Some time ago the Associated Press ran a deeply
moving story about a name-changing ceremony in Mumbai, India.
“More than 200 Indian girls whose names mean ‘unwanted’ in Hindi have chosen
new names for a fresh start in life,” reports the AP’s Chaya Babu.
The ceremony—the brainchild of a district health
official—came about as a response to a crisis
in India.
“The census showed the nation's sex ratio had dropped over the past decade from
927 girls for every 1,000 boys under the age of 6 to 914,” Babu writes. She
goes on to explain that such ratios are the result of abortions of female
fetuses, or just sheer neglect leading to a higher death rate among girls. The
problem is so serious in India
that hospitals are legally banned from revealing the gender of an unborn fetus
in order to prevent sex-selective abortions, though evidence suggests the
information gets out.
The fact that so many girls are killed before birth on the
mere basis of their gender, and that those who do survive are often given names
like “unwanted,” points to something deeply wrong with the culture’s view of
women. In the renaming ceremony, the girls chose happy- or strong-sounding new
names for them—names like Vaishali (“prosperous, beautiful, and good”) and
Ashmita (“very tough”). Their choices demonstrate that this ceremony was a step
toward changing that cultural paradigm—toward giving not just this one group of
girls, but India
itself, a fresh start.
When it comes to making children feel unwanted, though, India’s not the
only country with a problem. The United States may not have as high
a rate of sex-selection abortion, but unfortunately, we’ve been all too willing
to fall for the lie that a child’s value is based solely on whether he or she
is “wanted.” Who could forget former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders’ desire,
expressed in a magazine interview, that “every child born in America” be “a
planned, wanted child,” as a way to cut the rates of crime and poverty? Her
interviewer clearly understood this as a reference to abortion, as her very
next question concerned abortion laws.
I’ve been haunted by those words ever since
I first heard them, more than a decade ago. I’ve wondered, could Elders really
have realized what she was saying? On the surface, the phrase can sound good,
even noble: Let’s make every child feel wanted! But the flip side of that
statement is almost unfathomably cruel: If a child isn’t wanted, then he or she
shouldn’t be allowed to join the rest of the human race.
There’s a great deal of power in a name. Please pray that these girls would find their true worth in the name of Jesus Christ, which no one can take away.
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"Send me anywhere, only
go with me. Lay any burden on me, only sustain me. Sever any tie, but the ties
that bind me to your service and to your heart." --David Livingstone
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