Amazing how some holocausts come and go with such little fanfare.
"In China, quake losses lead to bittersweet baby boom; One year after disaster that killed 70,000" by Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times | May 17, 2009
MIANZHU, China - Ten months and 25 days after he buried his only child, Luo Gang became a father again at a makeshift hospital cobbled out of aluminum trailers.
For weeks after his 11-year-old daughter was killed in last May's massive earthquake here in Sichuan Province, his wife cried so uncontrollably that her family feared she might be having a breakdown.
Wouldn't you?
"If you don't have another baby, my sister will be grieving her whole life," Luo said his brother-in-law advised him. Luo said he was shocked by the tactlessness of the suggestion.
"We were in a bad way after the earthquake. My wife couldn't stop crying," recalled Luo, a 35-year-old welder, his eyes sunken deep with fatigue after a long night waiting for his wife to give birth to their son. He spoke outside the hospital room where his perfect little baby, born a few hours before, lay wrapped in bunting in a metal bassinet next to his mother, both sleeping contentedly.
"Now, we are better. A new life has been created to take the place of the one that was taken away."
Oh, man, I must be a DAMN OLD FOOL because I AM BALLING RIGHT NOW!!!!
All I can say is I am HAPPY for the Chinese family because they are JUST LIKE ANYONE ELSE!
To say that survivors of the May 12, 2008, earthquake, which killed an estimated 70,000 people, are recovering would be premature, given that many are still living in tents and searching for the remains of loved ones.
But thousands of couples in their 30s and 40s, most of whom lost an only child, have decided they cannot wait. The result is a bittersweet baby boom, the joy of each birth tempered by the rawness of recent loss. "Chinese people are very practical," said a maternity nurse at Mianzhu City Hospital. The nurse, who did not wish to be quoted by name, said that eight of the 70 mothers in the maternity ward had lost children in the earthquake.
Hey, those lives are lost!
They CAN BE GRIEVED FOR; however, NEW LIFE DEMANDS CARE and ATTENTION and SHOULD be CELEBRATED!
In Mianzhu, 50 women who lost children in the quake have given birth and 400 are pregnant, said Song Tao, director of family planning for the town. Family-planning officials, who enforce the limits on family size, are encouraging couples who lost their only child to have another. The government is paying for fertility counseling, operations to reverse vasectomies, and tubal ligations, as well as removal of intrauterine devices, the most common form of birth control in China. The motives are not purely humanitarian.
You know, NEITHER ARE OURS!!! I'm tired of WORRYING ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE when MY OWN GOVERNMENT is such a s***!!!!!
The government needs to quell resentment over its unpopular limits on family size. Sichuan has long been a battleground over the policy, with the government strictly enforcing the one-child limit.
Seems like NO ONE LIKES their OWN GOVERNMENT anywhere!
The WHOLE WORLD must be "terrorists," huh?
Among Sichuan's predominantly rural population, most people have no retirement plans other than the long-ingrained Chinese tradition that children care for their elders.
You know, that is WHERE OTHERS OUTDO US, I'm sorry to say, 'murkn!
"The earthquake very much highlights the vulnerability of the one-child policy," said Gu Baochang, a professor of demographics at People's University in Beijing. It might sound calculating, but the death of a child is an economic as well as emotional catastrophe for many Chinese couples.
Yeah, the FORCED ABORTION POLICY of COMMUNIST CHINA does bother me; however, that is THEIR PROBLEM!
How many times I gotta type LOCAL, LOCAL, LOCAL, when it comes to SOCIAL, SOCIAL, SOCIAL?
"We spent all our money on our child. The money is gone. The child is gone," said Liu Shengying, 39, whose 18-year-old daughter died with most of her classmates when her school collapsed. A few months after the earthquake, Liu had her IUD removed and her husband had surgery for a prostate condition. She is now five months into a difficult pregnancy.
Oh, man.
Among rural Chinese, it is unusual for women older than 35 to have babies, and the rush to replace children killed in the earthquake has raised new complications. Rural Chinese women on average enter menopause about five years earlier than Westerners because of lifestyle, genetic, and dietary factors, said Wang Yijue, director of the Sichuan Reproductive Health Research Center, which has treated about 100 parents of earthquake victims.
When she began seeing such patients last summer, Wang says, she discovered that more than half the mothers had stopped menstruating because of the stress and depression resulting from the earthquake. She said the women also have suffered larger than normal rates of miscarriage.
Oh, the cruel world heaps suffering upon insult upon injury!
Even with successful pregnancies, the prospective parents describe a tangle of emotions, mostly guilt and anxiety. Will the baby live up to the memory of the child they lost? Will they be able to love the new child as much? Will they tell the new child that he or she exists only because their older child died?
Whatever you do, JUST LOVE THEM!!
There goes this weak old fool again!
LIFE is PRECIOUS and CHILDREN are its GEMS!!!!
If ANYTHING has taught us this, has it not been the Chinese earthquake?
"When I try to think about the new baby, it reminds me of my dead daughters, and that is so painful," said Qiu Guangrong, who is eight months pregnant and who lost a 6-year-old and a 1-year-old in the earthquake. (As a member of the Qiang minority, she was permitted to have two children.)
At the hospital, even as Luo Gang's eyes sparkle when he speaks of the baby, he averts his face at the mention of his daughter, Huilin. His voice betrays a hint of a quaver when he tells how she delighted in cooking breakfast for her parents. "Wake up, Daddy. It's time for work," Luo remembered her telling him.
Old man busted down!
All this proves is the CHINESE LOVE THEIR CHILDREN with ALL THEIR HEARTS -- as all parents do -- and DON'T YOU EVER LET ANYONE TELL YOU DIFFERENT!!!!
Her mother, Zhang Anhui, pulled the 11-year-old alive from the wreckage of the Hanwang Central Primary School, but she died the next morning. On April 7, the couple's baby, Junjie, was born - 2 1/2 weeks before his due date, but just in time for a new beginning.
--more--"
Oh, THANK GOD for the LITTLE ONES!!
I think I have to stop and take a break now!
