The Communist Chinese policy of birth control by coerced abortions to reduce the birth rate of couples to one child is a very real and grim fact. LifeSiteNews recently reported the story of Chen Guangcheng, a dissident who escaped from China and is shining the spotlight on Apple Corporation, whose employees at factories in China are compelled to undergo monthly pregnancy tests.
Liu Ping, a Chinese woman testifying last year before a congressional committee that oversees human rights in a hearing entitled “China’s One-Child Policy: The Government’s Massive Crime Against Women and Unborn Babies,” described how the communist-controlled government operated in the Apple factory in China where she worked:
By order of the factory’s Family Planning Commission, every month during their menstrual period, women had to undress in front of the birth planning doctor for examination. If anyone skipped the examination, she would be forced to take a pregnancy test at the hospital. We were allowed to collect a salary only after it was confirmed that we were not pregnant. When discovered, pregnant women would be dragged to undergo forced abortions — there simply was no other choice.
What Liu Ping described was also the practice at 23 other Apple facilities in China. Ms. Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women’s Rights Without Borders, condemned the inaction of Apple in preventing these sorts of human rights abuses. In response to a claim that Apple was working to correct these problems, Littlejohn declared, “Why, then, is it still the case that pregnancy testing is reported as rampant? Either Apple’s requirement that these practices must stop is new or its policies to implement it are ineffectual.”
Littlejohn also demanded that more be done to follow up on cases of forced pregnancy testing:
We want to know what has happened to women at Apple factories when they have been found to be pregnant without a birth permit. Have they been referred for a forced abortion or involuntary sterilization? With the one child/forced abortion law in place, how can Apple assure consumers that its products are made in facilities free of coercive population control?
“The women of China are neither safe nor secure so long as this heinous policy is permitted to exist,” Littlejohn insisted. “Any discussion of women’s rights or human rights would be a charade if forced abortion in China is not front and center.” She added that the Chinese one-child policy “causes more violence against women and girls than any other official policy on earth.” She filed a complaint about this policy in August 2012 with the UN Population Fund.
Often this state policy of one-child families is enforced simply by homicide. In late July USA Today reported that a baby was killed in the town of Moshan, Shandong province. The parents already had one child, so population control officials tracked them down and injected the mother, who was nine-months pregnant, with an abortion-inducing drug. The baby was pulled out of the mother “like a piece of meat,” the story said. The baby was crying when authorities shoved it into a bucket to die.
According to a story in Epoch Times, in 2009, a mother and baby died after an abduction and forced abortion by officials in the city of Liaocheng:
According to a doctor at the hospital where the two died, the young woman was kidnapped by the Birth Control Office and taken to the hospital where she was forced to undergo an abortion procedure. The young woman fought with staff to protect her unborn child, however a half a dozen men, pushed her down on a bed and injected her with a drug to induce labor. After the young woman had a still birth, she developed a massive hemorrhage and soon thereafter died.
The Chinese policy is also a form of “gendercide,” as some have described it. Because boys are more desired than girls in nations such as China and India, it is much easier for authorities to gain acquiescence on the infanticide of unborn baby girls. Studies how found that there are 40 million “missing” girls in China and 50 million in India.
The Obama administration has been indifferent about ending this practice. Vice President Joe Biden, for example, has said that he “understands” the need for China’s “one child policy.” White House Science Czar John Holdren has written in favor of forced abortions and compulsory sterilization. And outside the administration, Ted Turner and others, including a number of U.S. academicians, have argued for the need for state control over reproduction — even including the murder of perfectly healthy and wanted babies — in order to maintain the proper population balance.
