This is a short clip from the NatGeo documentary titled “China’s Lost Girls.”
Historically in China, families have preferred boys to girls because boys are expected to carry on the family name and care for their parents in their old age. Combine this cultural gender preference with China’s “one child policy,” and you find the root of China’s heart-breaking influx of abandoned baby girls. Millions of perfect, innocent young girls are “abandoned, aborted, or hidden,” solely because of their sex.
This video brings you into an orphanage, where cribs are lined up to fill every usable space in the room. It’s heartbreaking. It makes you wonder, “How often do they actually get held and loved on?”
Something that the reporter, Lisa Ling, points out is how the children about to be adopted are crying their little hearts out. The orphanage is the only place many of them have ever known. They were abandoned or turned over to the orphanage as infants. And yet, these children, once abandoned, were now, as described by Ling, “enveloped into the arms of these parents who had been waiting for so long to love them.” At least a few of China’s “Lost Girls” had been found again.