Abuse of women and girls

My friend Gerry Martin posted this as a book to put on your list:

"From the book Half the Sky, by the husband/wife team of Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn:

The global statistics on the abuse of girls are numbing. It appears that more girls have been killed in the last fifty years, precisely because they were girls, than men were killed in all the wars of the twentieth century. More girls are killed in this routine "gendercide" in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the twentieth century"
 

"Numbing" may be the correct word. Can you imagine this? It is beyond my ability to contemplate, and when you consider the size of the "slaughters" in the genocides of the twentieth century, there is the Holocaust, but then Nigeria, Congo, Cambodia, Bosnia/Serbia and so on.

I asked Gerry if this included abortions of female fetuses, and it evidently does not.

Whenever I think of the injustices of the world, I consider that my mother was nine years old before women in the US were allowed to vote. People do amazingly cruel things to each other.

Sorry for the thought of the day to be of this nature.