Huffman Coding

… with a bunch of Family Stuff too

Fairer and Rarer

Two of my daughters were adopted from China. With China’s one-child policy, men outnumber women by about 50 million in the country. If you consider there are about 500 million women in China, that means about 10% are missing due to sex-based abortions and female infanticide. Tens of thousands of girls are adopted each year by foreigners, but 98% of the female orphanage population is never adopted. No one domestically adopts those girls.

Now decades after the policy has been put in place, there is a dearth of eligible women in the patriarchal rural areas. It is compounded by the fact that many young women flee the countryside because the inbalance gives them the opportunity to seek better lives in the city.

It has gotten so bad that men are marrying their first cousins. Perhaps now females will be valued enough that today’s couples will not kill their young.

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