Continued from here where I was hesitating to spout off about the new China adoption rules ...

There are a significant number of people writing now about the new rules being a valid way for China to address the issue of supply and demand.

Comments like the following are very common:

It seems to me be more of an issue with not enough "healthy" babies to meet the demand. There is an increase in domestic adoption within China, a decrease in the number of babies being abandoned, and flood of ever-increasing files from the rest of the world.

At some point, you simply run out of "healthy" children...

Sorry, but ... excuse me?

To have this sort of thinking show up in the same week that I've been reading, writing and thinking deeply about female infanticide hits me SO the wrong way.

Do people really think that there's a dearth of baby girls in China? That they are rare commodities that suddenly have some great value?

PAAALLLLLEEEEAAAASSE! Get real!

First, no matter what ... one child policy or no ... girls in much of China are considered less than worthless. Getting rid of them, one way or another, is done as a matter of course, and has been for a very long time.

Over the years, there were millions not dumped in gutters only because they didn't make it even that far. The existence of orphanages may just be the only out mothers have. If there's one choice, and that choice is leaving a baby alongside a road near an orphanage or strangling-poisoning-drowning-burying it alive ... that's not a variety of options, just one that means you kill your child ... which would you choose?

Google "Female infanticide in China" and read all about it.

Start here with Gendercide Watch, where the true scoop is put right out there for anyone to see, complete with attribution, references and cold, hard facts.

"A tradition of infanticide and abandonment, especially of females, existed in China before the foundation of the People's Republic in 1949," note Zeng et al.. ("Causes and Implications," p. 294.) According to Ansley J. Coale and Judith Banister, "A missionary (and naturalist) observer in [China in] the late nineteenth century interviewed 40 women over age 50 who reported having borne 183 sons and 175 daughters, of whom 126 sons but only 53 daughters survived to age 10; by their account, the women had destroyed 78 of their daughters." (Coale and Banister, "Five Decades of Missing Females in China," Demography, 31: 3 [August 1994], p. 472.)

Sorry, but I don't believe the Chinese government is tightening up adoption rules because they're running out of unwanted baby girls, but rather simply because they can.

I'll keep saying this ...

There are NOT more potential adoptive parents in the world than there are children that need families. The ratio of starving, dying, suffering children to potential adopters is probably close to 100,000 to one.

So, facryinoutloud, do the math, already ...