In Asia, The Perils Of Aborting Girls And Keeping Boys
Courtesy PublicAffairs Mara Hvistendahl writes that women in Asia with access to technology are choosing to have boys over girls, which has led to an imbalance of gender that has left the region "missing" 160 million women.
After months of research, she discovered a wide gap in the ratio between boys and girls, not just in China, but in other parts of East and South Asia. In her book, Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, Hvistendahl writes that wider access to ultrasound technology and abortion has allowed parents in these developing countries to abort daughters in the womb and keep sons.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/magazine/the-criminalization-of-bad-mothers.html?_r=1&ref=magazine
The Criminalization of Bad Mothers
Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
Timmy Kimbrough at home with his daughter Josie, 2, and his stepdaughters, Nicole, 13, and Brooke Borden, 10, left. His wife, shown in the framed photograph, is in jail.
By ADA CALHOUN
Published: April 25, 2012
On a rainy day just after Thanksgiving, Amanda Kimbrough played with her 2-year-old daughter in her raw-wood-paneled living room, petting her terriers and half-watching TV. Kimbrough, who is 32, lives a few miles outside Russellville, a town of fewer than 10,000 in rural northwestern Alabama, near the border of Franklin and Colbert Counties. Textiles were the economic engine of the area until the 1990s, when the industry went into decline and mills shut down. Now one of the region’s leading employers is Pilgrim’s, a chicken supplier. The median household income is $31,213, and more than a third of children live below the poverty line.
Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
Heather Capps, 25, and her 5-month-old son, Malice, at a halfway house in Albertville, Ala. She was arrested after her son tested positive for Oxycodone.
As family members came in and out of the room and one daytime show slid into another — “The People’s Court,” “Intervention,” “Jerry Springer,” “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” — Kimbrough talked about her arrest following the death of her third child, Timmy Jr. Born premature at 25 weeks on April 29, 2008, Timmy Jr. weighed 2 pounds 1 ounce, and lived only 19 minutes. When Kimbrough tested positive for methamphetamine, her two daughters were swiftly removed from her custody, and for 90 days, she was allowed only supervised visits. Social services mandated parenting classes and drug treatment.
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