Tuesday, March 4, 2014
First Posting: Sold.
The culture that Lakshmi grows up in is extremely different than the one I live in. Women are treated with much less respect then the ways I have seen and she has grown up with a big weight on her shoulder and a great amount of innocence to the world around her. The lifestyle of her Nepalese neighbors is very unfamiliar as well. "This is also the season when the women drink the blue-black juice of the marking nut tree to do away with the babies in their wombs-the ones who would be born only to be buried next season" (page 11). I was surprised at hearing that abortion is prevalent in even some of the poorest towns in Nepal. I was interested at how different cultures view abortion and go about implementing it. Through many sites such as wikipedia, the history of... and abc news, I learned about different medical practices that have been conducted. Because of not enough education, as well as religious views, around 1/5th of pregnancies end in abortions. When abortions first began, many believed that jumping up and down could abort a child. In addition, people have tried to massage the baby out of the women, by applying pressure on the lower back. Some herbs and natural abortifacients have been used, which are probably similar to what is used in Nepal. There are pills used to perform this task, as well as medical procedures commonly used in the western cultures. It is interesting how there is such controversy about abortions in the US, whereas in Nepal, they abort the child so it doesn't die later, and it is simply a natural occurrence during the year. This shows that many solutions are different depending on the situation, and so it is important to try and relate to other people's perspectives.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Great post, Amara. Really good research into a compelling topic.
ReplyDeleteYour topic that you researched was very intriguing! I as well found that the whole reason for abortions in Nepal was very interesting. It interested me how the reason for abortion was for survival and so that the baby wouldn't have to suffer the next winter. They are a lot more empathetic than americans are. We mostly think about ourselves and not even about the baby. According to NBC thousands and thousands of babies get aborted every year in india. Mostly because they want males more than females but also because they know the baby just won't survive the next winter. I really admire the fact that they can think about the baby and not themselves.
ReplyDeleteOver the past 30 years there have been 12 million baby girls aborted in india alone according to NBC news. India needs to realize that males and females are equals and should never be thought of as higher and lower.
It also interested me when Amara talked about how women are treated much less than men. This wasn't a shock to me because we've learned about this in school, but some of the things i learned from the book were cruel and sad. The way Lakshmi's mother has to bend down to her husband and rub his feet while all he does is sit in his chair and gamble off their money appalls me.
This part of the story really interested me early on, because when I read that children constantly die in their early years, I became really sad. Then when the "chapter" said that the women "do away with the babies in their wombs", I immediately came to the question of 'How many children in an area like this, actually die young?' I found the answer from Worldwatch Institute Child Mortality, and at first I did not know if the numbers that were given were high or low. In rural part of India, the death rate is roughly 105 deaths per every 1000 births. In urban parts of India, it is roughly 69 deaths per 1000 births. 69 might seem like a low number for India! But also take into fact, that urban cities have better access to medical supplies, and health information. Still, this shows us that we need to put more into the health of people in third world countries, so that young children can grow older and fulfill their true potential.
ReplyDelete