““Boys were disposed of when they were deformed; girls when they were inconvenient. The result was a society-not just in Italy but in the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa-in which males outnumbered females by 30 percent or more. Most families simply refused to raise a second girl. Consider the instructions written by a man named Hilarion to his pregnant wife around the year Jesus was born: "If you are delivered of a child, if it is a boy keep it, if a girl discard it." Such orders were so ordinary, so unexceptional, that they didn't require a single word of justification. Christians, on the other hand, had a starkly different attitude: female infants were to be cherished equally with males as gifts from God.””
![“God picked a junior high girl [to be Jesus' mother]. Jesus was raised by a woman who today, we wouldn't even let her lead a bible study at a high school. But she could raise God.” quote by Mark Driscoll](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/f5b/mark-driscoll-2287_bible-study_god-picked-a-junior-high-girl-to-be-jesu_965872.jpg)
