Abigail is a little girl that we met this morning, the daughter of the head of the National Fellowship in India, Sunil. Her story is interesting. It began one evening when Sunil received a phone call from a family asking if he would take their new born baby, it was a girl and they didn’t want her, they wanted a boy. It’s a cultural thing that has horrific consequences, I have read quite often in the papers here about infanticide (the killing of a infant, in this case it is always a girl), abortions because the parents have found out the sex, fathers killing the baby in the womb of their daughters, all of this because of their determination to have a boy. We were shown some quite graphic pictures concerning this practice which statistically accounts for 7% of the population and if you work this out against the staggering birth rate 100+ girl’s per minute are being killed or allowed to die. Abigail’s story is a lot happier than this, Sunil and his wife went immediately and collected the girl who is now a healthy and quite confident girl, being brought up in a loving Christian home.
Abigail
The reality here is quite shocking, but it is the reality and it is important that we were exposed to the bare facts in some way during our trip. There are also other shocking practices and ordeals that infants have to go through such as the practice of dropping them from the top of a temple to a group of people holding a sheet below, as they drop they are said to collect the blessing of a god; some babies survive; some die, often of shock; some are injured and disabled.
We read in Isaiah 49:15 when God is asserting his commitment to Judah "Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne?” It seems that here in Kolkata she can.
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