Tasiyagnunpa Livermont

The election’s over, and those in the pro-life movement are going to do what we were going to do whether we got HB1215 passed or not-fight to save babies.

So, in the interest of saving babies, let’s talk about infanticide. Infanticide is the killing of newborn babies. Recently, in one of my classes and in talking with several fellow classmates, I was reminded of the genocide of female infants in Asia. Everyone knows about the baby girls in China being dumped at orphanages or killed, because their law requires a limit on children born and their people prefer sons to daughters.

What surprised me was to find out the high rate of female infanticide in India, amongst the highest caste or class. These are presumably the wealthiest families in India, yet they abort or kill their female infants at a higher rate than those of lower castes and class-who are poorer. In fact, abortion is a new fad in the gender selection of their children, since abortion is still fairly rare in India. Infanticide has been and still is the main way to discard female life.

So now that the election is over, I implore both the Jacks for Life group and the Women’s Coalition to some-how put aside the abortion component of this issue and somehow do something about infanticide. Surely our Women’s Coalition can agree with us at Jacks for Life that infanticide is wrong.

I usually am against the paternalistic notion that we in America know what’s best for other countries. This brings me smack into my own knowledge of Lakota and U.S. history, which is made up entirely of American hate and prejudice against a culture the American people did not and would not understand and respect. Most American wasicun (non-Lakota) still don’t get it.

But killing babies is wrong. Though I’m not usually a fan of Leslie Unruh, the talking head of the right to life movement in South Dakota, I had to agree with her on the night of the election that live baby is good, and dead baby is bad.

Throwing birth control at India will not work since these families discard their daughters because they’re trying to have sons. I’m told some wealthy families have resorted to in-vitro fertilization to eliminate female embryos in favor of male embryos. Of course, at this stage most pro-choice groups would say that zygotes aren’t babies.

Perhaps there is no way for pro-choice and pro-life groups to work together. Maybe the two groups cannot mix, because one is light and life and the other is darkness and death. If you’re pro-choice and an Indian woman hands you her newborn to kill, could you give the baby girl the poison?

Until all of us Americans can support life and the legislation to protect it, we are not in a particularly strong position to tell India what to do. But life is life, babies are babies, and they are all worthy of being saved, no matter what country or culture they’re from. Or what their developmental stage is.

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