CONTACT: Reggie
Littlejohn, President, Women’s Rights Without Frontiers
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Chinese Officials Forced to Meet Abortion Quotas
LINYI, SHANDONG PROVINCE, CHINA. According to a report in the Chinese government-related Global Times, local Chinese officials
have admitted having to meet “abortion quotas.”
Several local officials in Linyi stated that they were assigned
a quota of ensuring two to eight abortions each for the month of April. One official stated that he was
assigned a quota of one abortion in April and four in May.
If these officials do not meet their assigned quotas, they
will be punished.
Finding their jobs “unsavory,” some officials requested to
resign. This request was
denied. They therefore created a
way around enforcing the abortion quotas:
buy abortion certificates from women who have had elective abortions,
then present these certificates as documentation that the officials had met
their quotas. The officials paid
out of their own pockets between 5,000 and 10,000 yuan ($800 to $1600) for the
abortion certificates.
A deputy director of the Family Planning Bureau denied the
use of abortion quotas, stating, “We only asked them [the local officials] to take remedial
action to persuade women [with illegal pregancies] who have been pregnant for
less than five months to have an abortion.” Yet one village official told the Global Times that in order to pressure women with unapproved
pregnancies to abort, they would charge them two to three times the standard
amount.
Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women’s Rights Without
Frontiers, stated: “The Global Times report is significant on several
fronts. First, that a Chinese
Communist Party-related news organ issued a critical report concerning the One
Child Policy indicates that support for the Policy is eroding, even in official
channels. Some local officials
found the abortion quotas so appalling that they tried to resign their
positions, but were not allowed to resign. Meanwhile, if they did not meet their abortion quotas, they
would be punished. This is
evidence that the enforcers of the forced abortion policy are themselves
forced.”
Littlejohn continued, “The Global Times report demonstrates
something that the Chinese Communist Party has long denied: the use of abortion quotas. It also proves that forced abortion is
still practiced in China, despite recent minor modifications to the
Policy. For the Family Planning
Official to deny the use of abortion quotas stating that they are merely trying
to ‘persuade’ women to take ‘remedial action’ for unapproved pregnancies is
misleading. The term, ‘remedial
action’ is a euphemism for forced abortion in family planning regulations. The ‘standard amount’ of the fine for
an illegal pregnancy can be up to ten times a person’s annual salary. Most families cannot pay these terror
fines and so are forced to abort.”
Littlejohn concluded, “The time to end the One Child Policy
is now – especially since support for it appears to be eroding both on the
local level and in official channels.”
Sign our petition to end forced abortion:
Read the Global Times story:
