As stories of forced abortions continue to surface in China, a
women’s rights activist is arguing that the nation’s one-child policy
has widespread negative effects on the society, particularly its women.
Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women's Rights Without Frontiers, told
CNA that the one-child policy “is enforced through forced abortion, up
to the ninth month of pregnancy.
It is also enforced through forced
sterilization and coercive birth control.”
“This is the true war against women,” she stated.
Littlejohn’s organization recently translated an article by Lili Zeng, a
woman from Guangdong Province in the south of China. Posted on the
Chinese news site Tianya, the article said that “two days before my baby
boy was due, seven family planning officials held down my body and
forcibly aborted my baby by needle injection because I did not have a
‘birth permit.’”
The report is one of numerous similar accounts that have surfaced in
recent months, as social media allows Chinese women to tell their
stories to the world.
Last year, blind pro-life activist Chen Guangcheng made international
headlines by escaping house arrest in China and asking to be taken to
the U.S. to rest in safety with his family.
In her article, Zeng said that her child was born alive despite the
efforts to abort him, yet died soon after birth. According to Zeng, a
family planning officer told her, “I am just an executor of the policy.”
“If I were not the family planning director, there would be somebody
else who would have handled the situation the same way, and your fate
would have been the same,” the official continued. “If you want to blame
someone, please blame the (one-child) policy.”
Littlejohn charged that the total number of abortions conducted in
recent decades under the one-child policy “is greater than the entire
population of the United States,” and that many of the procedures “are
forced, and most of those births 'prevented' are females.”
She explained that the policy has heavily impacted Chinese demographics,
creating an overall population that is older and more male than it
would naturally be. In addition, low fertility rates, between “1.5 to
1.7 children per woman – well below the replacement level of 2.1,” are
creating a society that “is getting old before it is getting rich.”
“Beyond this,” she cautioned, “because of the traditional preference for boys, girls are selectively aborted.”
Littlejohn explained that “China has the most skewed sex ratio at birth of any nation: 119 boys born for every 100 girls.”
This sex-selective abortion is resulting in “an estimated 37 million
Chinese men who will never marry, because their future wives were
selectively terminated,” she added, noting that this imbalance “is a
powerful, driving force behind trafficking in women and sexual slavery”
throughout Southeast Asia.
The one-child policy further harms women by severely impacting their health, Littlejohn explained.
“Some forced abortions are so violent that the women themselves die,” she observed, “along with their full term babies.”
Forced sterilizations can also “lead to life-long health complications,”
and the one-child policy has had a negative effect upon the country’s
mental health, she cautioned.
Even the U.S. State Department recognizes “the traditional preference
for male children, (and) birth limitation policies” as factors in China
having the “highest female suicide rate of any country in the world –
approximately 590 women a day,” Littlejohn noted.
“Forced abortion shatters women psychologically,” she said.
Littlejohn urged those who object to the policy to support initiatives
to help women in the country, and specifically to help empower “the
woman to resist those who want her to abort or abandon her daughter.”