FOR
IMMEDIATE RELEASE: China’s One (Now Two) Child Policy Turns
37; Chinese Woman Dies After Husband Pressures her to Abort Four Girls in a Year
WASHINGTON,
D.C. China’s coercive population
control policy turns 37 this week (September 25). The news media touted the Two Child Policy as having
“abandoned,” “ended” or “ditched” the One Child Policy. However, forced abortion, involuntary
sterilization, the monitoring of women’s menstrual cycles, and the
sex-selective abortion of baby girls continue.
Over
the summer, for example, it was reported that a Chinese woman from
Anhui Province died after her husband pressured her into aborting four
pregnancies in a year, because he wanted a son. The couple already had a
four-year-old daughter. After the Two-Child Policy was
instituted on January 1, 2016, they decided to have a second child,
which the
husband determined would be a boy.
When the woman became ill because of the repeated abortions, her husband
divorced her. She used the divorce
settlement money (approximately U.S. $2500) to seek hospital treatment,
but
then died. Her husband did not
visit her in the hospital and was planning on marrying another woman at
the
time of the report.
Reggie Littlejohn, President of Women’s Rights Without
Frontiers, stated, “My heart breaks
for this woman, pressured into four abortions by her husband, then left to die
from the trauma – all because he wanted a son! Brutal son preference remains in China, and as I had predicted, the sex-selective
abortion of baby girls continues under the Two-Child Policy. Second daughters are still aborted or
abandoned.”
In an ineffective effort to stem the tide of sex-selective abortions,
the Chinese government has made it illegal for a doctor to inform a pregnant
woman of the gender of her child.
Nevertheless, people can learn the gender for a price, either by illicit
ultrasounds or other means.
Indeed, because of the demand, an “Underground Railroad” is carrying on a
“roaring trade” to smuggle the blood of pregnant women from mainland China into
Hong Kong, where it is tested for gender.
Government enforced abortion continues under China’s new Two Child
Policy. For example, on July 22, 2016 – more than six months after the institution
of the Two Child Policy -- a Guangdong couple was told they must have an
abortion or both lose their government jobs. The wife was eight months
pregnant.
Forced sterilization is still employed under the Two Child Policy,
usually against women, but at times against men as well. A Yunnan man’s ex-wife was sterilized for
having three children. He
remarried and had a fourth child, at which point he was sterilized earlier this
year.
Meanwhile, the shift to a Two Child Policy has not yielded the number of
new births needed to support China’s swiftly aging population. According to a study by researchers in
China and England, the Two Child Policy “will bring only a small increase in
population growth.” In 1965, just 3.3% of China’s population
was over the age of 65. Under the
One Child Policy, it was projected that by 2050, 29% would have been over
65. This percentage is only
slightly reduced to 25% under the Two Child Policy.
Littlejohn added, “China’s population problem is not that it has too
many people. It is that it has too
few young people to support its rapidly aging population. Senior suicide is on the rise, as
many elderly find themselves abandoned by their families and the Chinese
government provides no safety net for them. China desperately needs more babies, so much so that they
are considering paying couples to have
a second child.
So why does China continue coercive population control in any form?
“As I have long said, I believe the Chinese
Communist Party will never abandon coercive population control, because
coercive population control is keeping the regime in power. Although every couple is allowed to
have two children, single women are still forcibly aborted, as are third
pregnancies. Women of childbearing
age still have to go in for mandatory pregnancy checks several times a
year. Two Child Policy violators
are still forcibly sterilized. All
this instills terror. The Chinese
Communist Party is a brutal, totalitarian regime, which reigns with
terror. The Two Child Policy is
social control, masquerading as population control.
“We applaud the Trump administration’s decisive action of defunding the UNFPA, an
action for which we have long advocated, because of UNFPA’s complicity with
coercive population control in China.
“We call for the
immediate, unqualified end to all coercive population control in China. One
out of every five women in the world lives in China. The women of the world will not be free until the women of
China are free.”
In addition to advocating against coercive population control, WRWF’s “Save a Girl” Campaign has saved hundreds of
baby girls from sex-selective abortion or abandonment.
