By BRIAN CLOWES
(Editor’s Note: Brian Clowes has been director of research and training at Human Life International since 1995. For an electronic copy of chapter 4 of The Facts of Life, “The Chinese Forced Abortion Program,” e-mail him at bclowes@hli.org.)
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In 1980, the People’s Republic of China rolled out its family planning program with a flourish. Chan Muhua, director of the Chinese Family Planning Board, announced that “socialism should make it possible to regulate the reproduction of human beings. We should be able to produce human beings under a quota system, just as we produce bicycles and tons of steel.”
But in China, socialism has enabled the government to greatly restrict the production of human beings.
The coercive population control philosophy is utilitarian, holding that a goal that is deemed to be “good” by the people in power may be attained by any available means.
Not by moral means.
Not by ethical means.
Just by any available means.
A burst of defensive essays appeared in the English translations of Chinese magazines following disclosures about the coercive population control program. The bottom line of these essays was that “there are no universal and abstract human rights…from the Marxist standpoint, all rights emerge historically and are based on economic relations in society.”
Most people have heard at least some details about China’s forced abortion program. The direct cause of this coercion is the goal set by China’s “one child” policy planners in 1980: a reduction from the current population of 1.38 billion to only 370 million by the year 2080.
This ridiculous goal will supposedly be achieved by firmly controlling the country’s population by any necessary means. These include forced abortion, forced sterilization, forced use of contraceptives, and widespread female infanticide.
Pregnant women are frequently imprisoned in a small room, isolated from their families, and are not even allowed to leave so that they can change clothes or go to the bathroom. While they sit in misery on hard wooden benches, they are berated by government workers, who shout that they must perform their “duty to the State and the Party” by aborting.
This barbaric brainwashing endures for weeks on end if necessary, until the helpless mothers finally break down psychologically and emotionally and agree to “voluntary” abortions. This is how Chinese family planning officials can insist with straight faces that there are no forced abortions or illegitimate children in their country.
After she finally breaks, a woman, if she is in her last trimester, is taken to the local abortion mill and injected with Rivalor (du zhen, or “poison shot”), which causes congestive heart failure in the unborn baby. The child usually dies in agony over a period of about a day, and is then delivered dead.
Not only are the women themselves brutalized, but entire villages are held in terror by China’s “Planned Birth” policy. When one family produces an “over birth,” the entire village is often penalized with huge fines, leading to an atmosphere of mistrust and resentment among families. Family planning officials actively encourage this, since a divided village is a weak village and offers less resistance.
In many cases, homes in villages that house families with more than one child are bulldozed or burned. “Planned Birth” officials round up all women of childbearing age and force them to witness the destruction. This method is known as “killing the chicken to scare the monkey,” and is popular in maintaining Communist power and keeping the people in a perpetual state of terror.
Every woman must pledge to be sterilized immediately following her second birth. If she refuses to do so, she may be beaten, fined, or jailed. Fertile women must have a urine test and ultrasound completed every three months. If a woman tests positive for pregnancy, she must immediately have an abortion.
There is obviously no “right to privacy” in the PRC, especially when the subject is human reproduction. The euphemistically named 5,000,000 member “Women’s Federation” is the Gestapo of the Chinese family planning program, a kind of grown up and fully empowered National Organization for Women.
It aggressively “educates,” detects pregnancies, and accompanies women to the abortion clinics to ensure that they don’t have a change of heart (thus performing a service resembling the “clinic escorts” here in the USA). In the factories, the Women’s Federation even records and publicly displays a chart of each woman’s menstrual cycle and ensures that she uses contraception.
The Women’s Federation is ably assisted by the Chinese Family Planning Association, a Planned Parenthood affiliate, which boasts of its “extensive network of over one million branches and 94 million members and volunteers all over the country.”
Over the time period 1971 to 2013, the Chinese have committed more than 362 million surgical and medical abortions, with an almost incomprehensible high of 14.1 million in 1991 alone.
These numbers are horrifying, but the real horrors are only revealed when we look at individual stories of suffering borne by Chinese peasants.
Farmer Zhou Jianxiong’s wife was pregnant without state permission, so she ran away and hid. Family planning officials arrested and tortured Zhou in order to force him to reveal the whereabouts of his wife. They hung him upside down, whipped and beat him with wooden clubs, burned him with cigarette butts, and branded him with soldering irons. He bled to death without ever revealing the location of his wife. Then the officials arrested Zhou’s elderly mother and tortured her as well.
The murderers received 15 days of “administrative detention” for their “excessive enthusiasm.”
Gender Imbalance In The PRC
Because China generally allows couples to have only one child, and since both men and women value boys more than girls, the results are predictable. Even 30 years ago, the People’s Daily warned that “The butchering, drowning, and leaving to die of female infants has become a grave social problem.”
The Chinese sex ratio is becoming more and more unbalanced as ultrasonography to identify female preborn children becomes more widespread. As of 2013, China is suffering a shortage of 52 million females due to decades of sex selection abortion and female infanticide — and the situation is getting worse every year.
The implications of this gender imbalance are profound.
According to the United Nations, China’s population will start declining as soon as 2020. Fast-track city dwellers — the very people that China hopes will power its economic engine — are having almost no children at all. More than a fourth of all young urban couples will not have any children at all, and most refuse to follow Chinese tradition and take care of their elderly parents.
There are now 40 million men of marriageable age who are unable to find wives. Ninety-three percent of unmarried adults in the larger cities are men. Single men outnumber single women by a million in the 29 to 49 age group in Beijing alone. Men’s prospects for marriage, of course, are even bleaker in the rural areas, where female infanticide is most prevalent.
This gender imbalance already has contributed to the common practice of kidnapping rural women and selling them as brides to farmers. The Chinese Communist Party has revealed that, in 1990 alone, authorities discovered more than 19,000 cases of women sold against their will, and more than 60,000 people implicated in this trafficking were arrested. In the year 2000, 110,000 women were freed during a crackdown on human trafficking, but millions more will never be found.
If the gender ratio imbalance continues to worsen, it could also further fuel the rapid spread of prostitution in the nation’s cities.
Conclusion
From time to time, the mainline media attempt to give the impression that the brutal Chinese program is being ended or relaxed, but nothing could be further from the truth. The country’s population is still rising, and will peak at about 1.4 billion in about five years — but, as described before, the ultimate goal is to reduce the population to about one-fourth of this amount. This means that the Chinese authorities will have to keep the brutal pressure on for several more decades at least.
Last year, Wang Xia, chairman of the National Population and Family Planning Commission, stressed that “we must unwaveringly adhere to the One Child Policy as a national policy to stabilize the low birthrate as the primary task. We need to keep the One-Child Policy and keep the national birthrate low. . . . It’s our priority.”
The torture, the brainwashing, the terror, the murder — all of this is not only covered up by the Western media, it is celebrated by mainline “pro-choice” groups, as described in the previous article. We must understand that the highest goods to modern-day “feminists” are choice and self-autonomy, but even these must be sacrificed by a paramount concern for the environment and the “common good.”
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Next article: “Profile: The United Nations Population Fund.”
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