While I appreciate that something needs to be done about the female infanticide and generally the status of women around the world (especially in South and East Asia),this movie does not advance the cause. The message of female empowerment is merely a guise concealing the insidious true anti-choice message. I had been looking forward to watching this documentary for some time, but didn't feel steeled enough emotionally for it. A few weeks back I pulled it up on Netflix, and didn't make it far before I realized something was off. The first clue came in the use of the term "feticide." This term has a long pedigree, but in recent years it has been used primarily for anti-choice legislation. If it were only this instant I could get beyond it, since they were just talking about infanticide and maybe it was just a regional Indian term. Then Dr. Puneet Bedi said "Infanticide was a very horrible, very terrible thing to live with for the rest of your life, so the medical profession provided an easy, kinder way of killing. AS IF KILLING BEFORE BIRTH SOMEHOW MADE IT KINDER." Then without sourcing, an animated story is told of unscrupulous doctors performing sex selective abortions on the down low. In the India portion there is a focus on prosecuting doctors who provide sex selective abortions. Once the film moves on to China, the government is vilified for encouraging abortion. It continues like this for the whole movie. There will be a few minutes of film from a social work prospective, and then the anti- abortion propaganda appears again. There is no discussion of reproductive rights as a means to empower women, even though a great number of studies have found this approach to be extremely effective. It wasn't until after I watched the film and was feeling a little disturbed (not from a sense of empathy, but from the feeling that I was deceived) that I decided to Google the film with the word "abortion," and discovered that the film was produced by Shadowline Films, which is a shell corp for Harvest Media Ministry, a producer of "pro-life" documentaries. There is an excellent Slate article explaining the film's anti-choice ties entitled "It's a Trick: Pro- choice groups love this movie. Its director worked for a pro-life ministry. How did that happen?" written by international human rights legal scholar Sital Kalantry .

This documentary is difficult to review, since while it is an important topic, it is presented in a incredibly oversimplified format, all made worse by the addition of awful drawings to 'tell' the story (as if one needed these graphic representations),'experts' from various human rights organizations speechifying, and yet, they do NOT add anything new, nor do they suggest real solutions. Just because some man states that "women should be worth as much as a man", that doesn't actually change anything.

I laughed out loud when one of the 'experts' interviewed (a woman) seemed outraged that women were not treated as equal in "those societies", which of course makes me ask, just where on this planet women are treated and seen as equal? (It won't be more than a handful of places, so this morally superior stance just rubbed me the wrong way. I have lived in Germany and the US and can report first-hand that they are a far cry from gender equality there.)

About the only thing I realized from this film was that the women in India that aborted female fetuses or killed their infant girls shortly after birth were really doing their never- or new-born daughters a kindness; having to live and grow up in such a hateful society where all you are worth is your dowry and your uterus' ability to produce a male baby is hell. I ended up coming closer to condoning their 'solution' than what feels morally right and defensible.

The situation in China seemed even more absurd, if the film reported the truth, with families unwilling to have girls, but willing to kidnap them so their son can have a wife.

What complicates the issue is that I did not hear the words 'overpopulation' at all. China's "one-child" policy did not come out of a vacuum, nor was it instated out of spite; it was an attempt to control a runaway overpopulation crisis.

The tone of the film - this morally superior we should treat everyone as equally valuable humans just because - without suggesting real solutions to the underlying (and overwhelming) problems of poverty, starvation/food shortages, overpopulation, lack of education, pollution, and etc., and without even questioning whether one's cultural background and preferences should be imposed on others made me dislike the documentary and question the tone/intent.

I just want to say first that the other review that criticizes the film and says its "nothing new", that right there is a big part of the problem. Treating these things like run of the mill world issues is why we aren't doing more to help the situation. We prefer boys to girls in most of the world. There is gendercide going on right here in America, we just don't have to be so hands-on about it. If people can't learn to care about what is going on in other countries with sex selection and other gender related issues, how are we to get rid of gender preference here? Anyways, the film was very powerful. I appreciated the brutal honesty from people who had killed their infant daughters, or aborted their child because she was a girl. We have a tendency to think that the bad things happening around the world and in your own country are being committed by bad people living in the shadows. In reality, it is just average people who you would see as no more dangerous than the next person. We need to understand that the problem lies in the culture and society norms, not the individual person. That is a lot of what is shown here. What is actually happening, who is doing it and why, and what the results of their actions are over time.

It is a good film, but very difficult to watch, especially if gender issues hit close to home with you. Watch it anyways, it is too important to ignore because reality makes you uncomfortable.