More than 1,000 infants -- most of them girls -- were killed or abandoned to die in Pakistan last year according to conservative estimates by the Edhi Foundation, a charity working to reverse the grim trend. The infanticide figures are collected only from Pakistan's main cities, leaving out huge swathes of the largely rural nation, and the charity says that in December alone it found 40 dead babies left in garbage dumps and sewers."
It's an example of the coldheartedness of the media that such news is usually ignored altogether. But this AFP report (written by Hasan Mansoor) was included for a time in Yahoo News' featured headlines this morning. Perhaps this is because the writer concludes the article with a shout-out to something the media is almost always in favor of -- "Abortion is prohibited in Pakistan, except when the mother's life is at risk from her pregnancy, but advocates say that legalisation would reduce infanticide and save mothers from potentially fatal back-street terminations."
In other words, Pakistan could end this unconscionable immorality of infanticide if it would only kill the children a few weeks earlier.
Sigh.
