I am of worth, of infinite worth...

The news lately has been hard to watch, hard to read. Yesterday, CNN did a story on the rise of honor killings in the west. I was so angry by the end of it that I wanted to hit someone. This poor young woman was killed by her family because she ran away from an abusive arranged marriage and found love with another man. It didn't matter that he made her happy or that they shared their faith - he was from the wrong village. Clearly a good reason to have your daughter raped, strangled, and then crammed into a suitcase and buried in some backyard. It makes you wonder who was a better follower of their faith.

Unfortunately, The Times of India has stories like this everyday. India has had female Prime Ministers and is about to have its first female President, but on the same front page that announces this there is a story of an underground abortion clinic that was discovered yesterday with the charred bones of female foetuses crowding a septic tank. There is a huge population disparity between males and females, even amongst the upper classes. Ads for abortion clinics say things like "Save 100,000 Rupees in 20 years, spend 2,000 now". There is legislation against gender-determining ultrasounds, but the underground market for this is huge and unborn girls continue to suffer for it. Even fertility clinics which boast 30% success rates have women aborting if it is found that they have conceived a girl. All that work, and the child is not enough. As you can imagine, this breaks my heart.

It is not just the babies that are in danger. Married women are killed or commit suicide years after their marriage because their new family is dissatisfied with their dowries. There was a story in the paper today about a woman who hung herself. It is exhausting to read.

I will never understand why being female is such a crime. Are we not all God's creation? Are we not all sufficient and worthy of acknowledgement? I wonder what it be like when the time eventually comes, whether it be in this life or the next, when those who have perpetrated such awful crimes against the helpless and innocent and those who did nothing to stop them will finally understand who those helpless were. Last night I finished reading Legends of Our Time by Elie Wiesel. It is a series of stories chronicling his search for understanding in the twenty years after the Holocaust. In his closing paragraphs he says something that just cut me. He is talking about the ridiculous notion of those who try to psychologically understand the plight of the Jews at that time. Basically, he says there are no answers and to try and find them is to blame the Jews for not rising up. He makes this statement "Let me reveal a secret, one among a thousand, about why Jews did not resist: to punish us, to prepare a vengeance for us later. We are not worth their sacrifice." It will come. It will come. It will come. God will not forget His daughters even if we do.