Books about Needing from Amazon.com

Kay Johnson has done groundbreaking research on abandonment and adoption in China. In Wanting a Daughter, Needing a Son, Johnson untangles the complex interactions between these social practices and the government's population policies. She also documents the many unintended consequences, including the overcrowding of orphanages that led China to begin international adoptions.

Those touched by adoption from China want to know why so many healthy infant girls are in Chinese orphanages. This book provides the most thorough answer to date. Johnson's research overturns stereotypes and challenges the conventional wisdom on abandonment and adoption in modern China.

Certainly, as Johnson shows, many Chinese parents feel a great need for a son to carry on the family name and to care for them in their old age. At the same time, the government's strict population policy puts great pressure on parents to limit births. As a result, some parents are able to obtain a son only by resorting to illegal behavior, such as "overquota" births and female infant abandonment.

Yet the Chinese today value daughters more highly than ever before. As many of Johnson's respondents put it, "A son and a daughter make a family complete." How can these seemingly contradictory trends--the widespread desire for a daughter as well as a son, and the revival of female infant abandonment--be happening in the same place at the same time? Johnson looks at abandonment together with two other practices: population planning and adoption. In doing so, she reveals all three in a new light.

Johnson shows us that a rapidly changing culture in late twentieth-century China hastened a positive revaluation of daughters, while new policies limiting births undercut girls' improving status in the family. Those policies also revived and exacerbated one of the worst aspects of traditional patriarchal practices: the abandonment of female infants.

Yet Chinese parents are not literally forced to abandon female infants in order to have a son. While birth-planning enforcement can be coercive, parents who abandon are rarely prosecuted. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Chinese parents informally adopt female foundlings and raise them as their own. Ironically, as Johnson shows, in some places adoptive parents are more likely than abandoning parents to incur fines and discrimination.

In addressing all these issues, Johnson brings the skills of a China specialist who has spent over a decade researching her subject. She also brings the concerns of an adoptive parent who hopes that this book might help others find answers to the question, What can we tell our children about why they were abandoned and why they were available for international adoption?.
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What-s a lonely nympho to do?

Attacked by a drunken uncle, Melanie discovered sex and, despite the aggression of her first sexual experience, she couldn-t stop seeking out sexual gratification again and again!

With a grim look on her pretty face, Melanie Patton gulped down the remainder of her Bloody Mary and poured another from the pitcher on the patio table in front of her, trying to block the memory of her husband wanting to lick her naked pussy the night before from her mind. The voluptuous twenty-five-year-old blonde felt the cool liquid slide down her throat and suddenly turn into a glow of warmth deep within her.

"Oh darn!" she swore aloud and took another long sip from her third drink. A voice inside her cautioned she should slow down or she would be tipsy before their dinner guests arrived, but she continued to drink. The alcohol was already beginning to cloud her thinking and loosen her usually tightly controlled inhibitions, which made her angry. And that anger was directed at her husband. Tony ... and all because of SEX!

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Her voluptuous young body, clothed in a short denim skirt and red checkered blouse, shuddered violently as she recalled the horror she had felt that afternoon. She had gone home to Prescott, where her widowed mother lived with Aunt Lottie and Uncle Max, during semester break. Her mother and her aunt had gone out shopping for the day and since Uncle Max was in the living room drinking beer, Melanie had decided to take a long shower and stay in her room dreaming of how romantic her wedding night would be, and wondering if...sex...was as wonderful as all the girls in her school dormitory had said it was. She was lying there dreaming when suddenly Uncle Max had entered her room and saw her lying there naked on the bed. She had tried to cover herself but her robe was on her dressing table stool, and he had stared down at her exquisitely molded young body for a full minute, his drunken, lust-glazed eyes roving over the upthrust of her-.

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