On
June 1st, all provinces in China celebrate “Children’s Day” with lavish
children’s art exhibitions and performances. Meanwhile, no mention
will be made of the fact that China has “prevented” more than 400
million children from being born, often by forced abortion and
sterilization, through its brutal One (now Two) Child Policy. In
addition, millions of Chinese baby girls are being aborted or abandoned,
just because they girls.
In fact, this precious baby girl, “Anqi,” is celebrating Children’s Day because Women’s Rights Without Frontiers’ (WRWF) Save a Girl Campaign
empowered her mother to save her life. When Anqi’s mother had Anqi’s
older sister, her mother-in-law was unhappy. She told Anqi’s mother
that the next baby would be a boy.
When
Anqi’s mother became pregnant with her second child, her mother-in-law
wanted to find out the baby’s gender. Anqi’s mother refused. She knew
that her mother-in-law would force her to have an abortion if the baby
were a girl. Chinese women not only face pressure from the government
to abort their “illegal” babies, but also from family members who impose
sex-selective abortion.
Anqi’s
mother did not want an abortion; she wanted her baby, whether a boy or a
girl. But her mother-in-law persisted. She went to a fortuneteller,
and followed her instructions on how to ensure that the baby would be a
boy. When Anqi was born a girl, her grandmother was very upset and
tried to pressure Anqi’s mother to “give her daughter away.” In the
Chinese countryside, to “give away” a daughter sometimes means to give
her to a childless couple. Sometimes it means to leave her in a field
to die.
