AS the father of two lovely, educated and talented women, I certainly don't want to be seen as minimizing the horrors of female infanticide. (My daughters would kill me!) It's a desperate measure arising out of desperate circumstances that no family should have to endure. But in Asia, it's just an ugly reality, and obviously not a by-product of communism so much as a long-standing perceived survival mechanism deeply embedded in the various local cultures. I think a large part of it is just sheer stupidity, the culture not permitting the families to see the illogic implicit in their "survival mechanism." Education and better standards of living seem to be the best answers. But the prejudice runs deep, and it's pervasive through all classes.
Back a few years when my wife was pregnant with our first child, I happened to run into a well-educated, young, upper-class Pakistani fellow who had worked for me but then left amicably to return to school. We were catching up on each other's news, when I told him my wife was expecting, and I still remember how his face lit up and he shook my hand, saying "Congratulations, sir! May it be a boy!!!"
