Results tagged “girlbabies”

Taobao - the place where you can buy everything... even, it seems, babies. An anonymous seller put an infant up for sale on the online auction site yesterday for the low price of 1RMB. Of no surprise to anyone who's read of unwanted babies in China - this one was a girl.

...two abandoned conjoined twin girls who will undergo separation surgery tomorrow at Shanghai Children's Hospital. Six-month-old Sui Jianshuang and Sui Jianlian are connected from the chest bone to the stomach for 15cm. They share a liver, but each has her own heart, lungs, kidneys and digestive system, making the chances of surviving a separation surgery better. The girls were abandoned outside an orphanage in Guangdong province, which then contacted Shanghai Children's Hospital about the possibility of surgery late last month. The hospital agreed to take on the case, and have also issued a country-wide alert for the parents to come forward. "We want their parents to show up so they can have a real family," a hospital official said. Awwwww! Source: Shanghai Daily

The dearth of girl babies may have changed attitudes about the preference for boys, according to the Telegraph. Well... at least in Shanghai, where it seems like 15% of 3,500 parents questioned by government researchers actually copped to hoping for the fairer sex (as opposed to 12% for the opposing gender). Of course, once you go back out into the countryside, or any city that isn't Shanghai, you're still stuck with the same dilemma. What's worse, the reasons for having girl babies seem pretty economical and not very progressive. One mother says she'd prefer boys, but insinuates that having a girl means she won't have to find her child a good school, a good job, or a house and car. Another lady put it this way: "Girls can marry rich husbands." Jeepers. Looks like we still have a ways to go.

Bucking tradition, Shanghainese parents are agreeing to have more female children and causing the boy-heavy gender imbalance in the city to decline for the first time in eight years. Boys are now only born 114.8 to every 100 girls, down from 115.2 in 2007. The natural ratio for boy to girl births: around 105:100. Okay, so it's still a ways off from reflecting nature, but any improvement at all is good news for womenfolk (and the menfolk who pursue them). Even better, it seems that the city influences migrant workers - their male:female birth ratio fell from 123.4:100 to a significantly lower 121.9:100. Source: Xinhua