Opinionated News

I was going to blog about Hillary today, you know, “THE” Hillary, but something caught my attention yesterday and touched my heart.  It’s the story of a country who created a law to try and keep a lid on its population, a law that meant each couple could only have one child, a country who recently experienced a natural disaster followed by the loss of thousands of these children belonging to one-child families.  

China’s recent earthquake was responsible for killing many thousands of people, the full death count won’t be known until the most affected areas can be reached by the necessary equipment and the bodies reclaimed from the debris.  Amongst these buildings are schools.  Schools full of children who belonged to parents who survived, only to find that their child perished.  As the shock wears off, the parents are naturally thinking about more children, but for many this is currently impossible because they underwent sterilization to prevent a second child being born in a country where it is against the law. 

Consequently there’s a team of medics going to China not to fix broken bones, but rather to help fill the gap in the hearts of parents who lost their child to the earthquake.  These medics will try to reverse about 7000 sterilizations to give the hope of new life to these devastated parents.  Nothing can bring back the child they lost, but the compassion of the medics on this team, will help them rebuild a new family from the rubble that remains of their past life.  I hope they succeed. 

China has such a huge population that it’s hard to say that it’s wrong to dictate that a family may only have one child, especially when the world knows that mistakes happen and because of this law some children are left to die, or given to adoption agencies, especially the girls or those who have some health defect.  Many people in China experience worse poverty than we’ve ever known, and perhaps there is some sense in trying to keep a population within reasonable limits.  But when you see a situation like this and hear of small towns where almost every school-age child perished in a heartbeat, it makes you wonder.

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