Sickening

This is what happens in societies that don’t value women:

Her relatives had always described her as a colicky baby.

When Luo Cuifen was 26, she found out a likely reason why.

Doctors discovered more than two dozen sewing needles embedded in her body, some piercing her vital organs.

X-rays of her head and torso look like a dart board.

Doctors believe the needles were driven into her body when Luo was days old. One in the top of her skull could only have been stuck there when the bones in her head were still soft.

“They wanted her dead,” said Qu Rei, a spokesman at Richland International Hospital in Yunnan province, which has agreed to surgically remove the first six of the 26 needles in her body today. “The fact she is still alive is a medical miracle.”

Luo does not remember ever being stabbed. Relatives suspect her grandparents. They wanted a grandson instead of a second granddaughter.

“I was horrified,” said Luo, now 29, in an interview by phone Monday from her hospital room. “How could they do such a thing to me when I was so young?”

If you go here you can read the rest of the story, which not only discusses other horrors visited on female fetuses and babies, but shows one of Luo’s x-ray.