The baby newspaper

The orphanage provided us with a copy of the ad that had run in the local newspaper after Juliet (then just An Meiyue) and her sisters had been found. Our Juliet is in the lower right-hand corner, and it's the same photo that came with our referral from the Chinese government. I think that Tara is the fourth baby from the right on the top row, while Meihui must have been a different month's publication (she turns 1 tomorrow, so she's a little bit older than Tara and Juliet, so this makes sense). I find myself struck by the plight of all these poor, helpless, unwanted, and darling little girls. I wonder how many pages come out, in how many town newspapers, all across China, month after month, year after year. And even just looking at these sixteen little babies, I wonder how and why we happened to get this particular one--why her fate will be so different from that of her sisters.

Joyce had a moment yesterday when she wondered whether she was behaving like one of the privileged women from Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, a post-apocalypic novel where the fertility rate is so low that fertile women are torn from their families and loved ones and forced to serve as handmaids (literally broodmares) for rich and powerful members of society. The difference initially seemed clear to me: the handmaids are unwilling, coerced by a patriarchal Reagan-esque nightmare of a society; our daughter's biological mother chose to give her up. But the issues are not nearly so clear-cut. Whatever your thoughts about contraception and abortion, China's one-child policy is an absolute demographic necessity, which if not implemented would lead to a Malthusian catastrophe that would make modern Africa look like a garden party. China's boy-valuing culture predates the one-child policy by millenia, and led to huge numbers of abandoned and orphaned girls even before the policy. But both can be seen as aspects of an oppressive, patriarchal society. Did the combination of one-child policy and boy-valuing culture coerce our daughter's mother to give her up? I'm inclined to believe that the boy-valuing culture has had more effect than the one-child policy, so that many of these girls would have had the same fate even without the policy. But that's just a guess on my part--I could just be rationalizing the process by which Joyce and I benefit.

One thing is for sure: Joyce and I bear no responsibility for creating China's boy-valuing culture or for implementing the one-child rule. Our adoption of Juliet may create a demand that buttresses this unfortunate combination, that is the closest to moral risk that we come. Other than that, we offer Juliet a better education and a higher standard of living than she otherwise might have enjoyed. When she is old enough to choose for herself, I fervently hope that she agrees with our choice for her.