Truth Can Be Stranger Than Fiction

Two disturbing news items that I heard today:

• The first one is quite bizarre: a woman was discovered dead in her home after having been missing for ten hours. She was--get this--found in her home but wasn't discovered for such a long time because of the amount of junk and clutter in the home. Her husband said she was missing, police came and helped search. At first, they had trouble even entering the house because of all the stuff. They searched for hours, outside/inside, and finally found her. It was surmised by her husband that she fell while looking for the phone. She suffocated in. her. piles. While searching, there were times when the police hit their heads on the ceiling because the piles were so high. Is this just one of the worse cases of hoarding EVER? What a way to go. Creepy. Sad.

• In India, where the female gender is apparently not as "important", officials figure that there have been possibly as many as 10 million abortions of female fetuses in the last several years. Since the ultrasound has been introduced and families are able to determine the sex of the child, abortions have increased. And it's estimated that for every one legal abortion, there are about 10 illegal ones. Some places are now considering banning the ultrasound so as to prevent abortions. But won't that just result in baby girls mysteriously "disappearing" when, upon birth, it's discovered that the child is not a coveted male heir? I know there are similar atrocities that occur in other countries. It sounds kind of like a horror story. Is it just as horrifying there or is it business as usual? And this isn't about abortion so much as it's about abortion just because the baby's a girl. Hard to comprehend (being a girl and all). Actually, being human and all.