It’s a Girl!
A girl has the right to live not just because she is a girl, not just because she can contribute to society and not just because she could change the world but because it is her most BASIC HUMAN RIGHT!
One of the most beautiful events in a human being’s life is the act of coming into the world and being born but sadly as deplorable as it may sound, girls born of women (who themselves were once girls) are not always welcomed into the families that they are born into with open arms.
‘Women have the power to give life and …take it away’ is the stunning declaration made by a woman who admits to having killed eight unwanted baby daughters. Filmed on location in India and China, the movie: It’s a Girl! takes an unflinching look at the global tragedy of gendercide. A word which has made its way into our contemporary lexicon simply because some people think that being born female is a curse rather than a blessing and decide that they need to do something drastically tragic about it.
The United Nations tells us that 200 million girls have ‘disappeared’ either killed, abandoned or (often forcibly) aborted simply because they are girls.
This movie depicts the human stories behind the awful statistics, woven into this heart-breaking tale are interviews with activists who are working (and fighting) hard to overcome the issues of misogyny, poverty, ignorance and a belief in primitive cultural practices that make gendercide a difficult and complicated topic to tackle.
For even those girls that are allowed to live, life is most often not easy. Mao Zedong, famously said that ‘women hold up half the sky’ but they do this in the face of the most unspeakable oppression imaginable. I have never been able to finish reading Nicholas Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn’s Half the Sky, because the kind of oppression they so eloquently narrate is so real it is unsettling for me as a woman and the mother of a young girl child. Half the Sky is now available as a PBS documentary, with some A list celebrities lending their voice to speak out against the oppression of women and girls.
Women are not the problem, they are the solution.
