Monday, October 20, 2014

PRESS RELEASE -- China: Two-Child Policy Will Not End Forced Abortion or Gendercide





Contact:              Reggie Littlejohn, President, Women’s Rights Without Frontiers
Email:                        reggielittlejohn@gmail.com
Cell:                        310.592.5722
Website:            www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE -- China:  Two-Child Policy Will Not End Forced Abortion or Gendercide

According to a report in Bloomberg Businessweek, Cai Fang, vice director of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, has stated:  “We will fully relax the policy” in two years, allowing all couples to have a second child.  The reason:  China’s shrinking labor pool will cause the potential growth rate to fall an average of 6.2 percent annually from 2016 to 2020.
Reggie Littlejohn, President of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, has responded:  “The Chinese Communist Party is finally waking up to the fact that, by instituting the brutal One Child Policy for economic reasons 34 year ago, it unwittingly signed its own economic death warrant.  China will grow old before it grows rich.  China’s population problem is not that it has too many people, but that it has too few young people.” 
“To say that China ‘will fully relax the policy’ is extremely misleading,” Littlejohn continued.  “Allowing all couples to have a second child does not constitute a ‘full relaxation’ of the One-Child Policy. The problem with the One Child Policy is not the number of children ‘allowed.’  Rather, it is the fact that the CCP is telling women how many children they can have and then enforcing that limit through forced abortion, forced sterilization and infanticide.  Even if all couples were allowed two children, there is no guarantee that the CCP will cease their appalling methods of enforcement.  Women will still need a birth permit to have their first and second child.  Women who get pregnant without permission will still be dragged out of their homes, strapped down to tables and forced to abort babies that they want, even up to the ninth month of pregnancy. 


“Furthermore, instituting a two-child policy will not end gendercide.  Indeed, areas in which two children currently are allowed are especially vulnerable to gendercide, the sex-selective abortion of females.  According to the 2009 British Medical Journal study of 2005 national census data, in nine provinces, for ‘second order births’ where the first child is a girl, 160 boys were born for every 100 girls. In two provinces, Jiangsu and Anhui, for the second child, there were 190 boys for every hundred girls born. This study stated, ‘Sex selective abortion accounts for almost all the excess males.’  Because of this gendercide, there are an estimated 37 million Chinese men who will never marry because their future wives were terminated before they were born. This gender imbalance is a powerful, driving force behind trafficking in women and sexual slavery, not only in China, but in neighboring nations as well.
“The Chinese Communist Party periodically modifies the One Child Policy, but the coercion at its core remains.  Indeed, ‘One Child Policy’ is a misnomer that causes confusion.  There are numerous exceptions under which couples can have a second child, but enforcement through forced abortion remains.  It should be called China’s ‘Forced Abortion Policy.’ 
 “The coercive enforcement of China’s One Child Policy continues to cause more violence toward women and girls than any other official policy on earth, and any other official policy in the history of the world.  Those who care about women and girls must continue to press with persistence until forced abortion and gendercide are eradicated from the face of the earth.
“China’s Forced Abortion Policy does not need to be modified.  It needs to be abolished.”

View WRWF’s “Save a Girl” campaign to end gendercide and forced abortion. http://womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org/index.php?nav=end-gendercide-and-forced-abortion
Watch Stop Forced Abortion – China’s War on Women! Video (4 mins)

Related Links:

China to Broaden Two-Child Policy in 2 Years, Adviser Says