China: One Child Policy Trumps Party Loyalty

Let’s hope judicial activism is at work in China as well as in Canada.

Family Research Council reports on Chinese lawsuit related to forced abortion, a story carried in Britain’s Telegraph.

In a case that is believed to be the first of its kind, China's high courts have agreed to hear the suit of a young married woman who was forced to undergo an abortion against her will. Jin Yani, who violated Chinese law by becoming pregnant five months before she wed, was ready to deliver her baby when family planning officials appeared at the couple's door. They escorted her to a local abortion center, where her unborn child was given a lethal injection and later removed from the womb. Jin lost so much blood as a result of the procedure that she was hospitalized for six weeks and, in the seven years since, has been unable to conceive. The mere fact that the Yanis' suit will be heard is a victory of seismic proportions. It is certain to draw some unwelcome attention to a deep scar on the human rights record of this year's Olympic host.

China’s Stolen Children: Chinese Children Treated As Goods

[This posting links to video footage. Rather than skip my backbreaking post altogether, you could go directly to the video by clicking here.]

China’s One Child Policy is truly evil and unimaginable in consequences. The unseen horror of millions of abortions, the majority sex-selective, which directly result from the policy is by far the greatest evil. But there are countless untold evil spin-offs, such as the kidnapping and trafficking of over 70,000 Chinese children annually.

The Taipei Times of Taiwan today released a story of this horrendous trade in human beings which treats children as mere goods. It’s a heartbreaking tragedy which further devastates China’s society. Entitled Where's our child? the headline reads

In China, 190 children are stolen every day to full the demand for sons. Brokenhearted parents trying to find their loved ones face retaliation from traffickers and government intransigence.

The article goes on

If 190 people were dying every day from the same illness, you'd call it an epidemic. And that's exactly what it is, except nobody really wants to talk about it. Especially the Chinese government.

The government doesn't want to talk about it because it's a short step from fully acknowledging the kidnappings to having to address why they're happening. Which means entering dangerous territory - a root cause of such large numbers of children being snatched is the fact that having a son in China is a necessity. He carries the family name, he is the child who will provide for his parents as they age.

The One Child Policy has resulted in prohibitive family-planning laws in China: prospective parents must have a birth permit before conceiving and urban families must pay a fine for flouting the one-child rule. If you haven't had an abortion to get rid of your female child (although it is now illegal), how can you be sure to get a son? Sometimes the only choice seems to be to buy a stolen child, gender already determined.

The article tries to paint a picture of the corruption in Chinese society which fuels this kind of tragic injustice.

If you were caught buying a child in the UK, you would be charged with child trafficking. Yet in China - as incongruous as it may seem - while it is illegal to abandon, steal or sell a child, it is not necessarily illegal to buy one. CCTV, a government-sponsored news outlet, recently reported that "Under the current law for families that adopt trafficked children, if they have not abused the children, and have not obstructed the rescue operations, the law enforcement can choose not to press charges, not to pursue further. Many parents of missing children find that unacceptable."

Parents of stolen children are immediately on the back foot; the law is essentially non-punitive, so child traffickers can justify their actions - they are simply supplying a demand that is not, in itself, a crime. Except, of course, it is. People buying a child have no guarantee that the child was willingly given up by his parents. And when the motivator for providing that child is money, reassurances mean nothing. A boy can fetch around US$900 which is a lot of money for one "job," when you consider that a skilled production worker in China earns US$1,700 a year.

The Taipei Times story makes reference to a new documentary filmed on the subject. The documentary was filmed by True Vision and from the True Vision website, we get more information on this very controversial film.

True Vision's latest film, China's Stolen Children is as the centre of a growing controversy over China's attempts to ban it. According to the Sunday Times the Chinese Embassy in London is seeking an injunction to prevent the film being shown, the Embassy has also complained to Ofcom and written to the Channel Four Board.

The film follows the parents of 5 year old Chen Jie as they desperately search for their kidnapped son, one of up to 70,000 children kidnapped and sold in China every year as a result of the One Child Policy. It includes secretly shot footage of a trafficker buying a one year old boy in a park, and negotiating the sale of the child to a couple in a hotel room.

View the video of this awful tragedy here.

Sex Selection Abortion and America's Silent Bigotry

Colin Mason, Population Research Institute, writes an expose in the PRI Weekly Briefing on the silence in our society regarding sex-selective abortion, and the shocking reason behind it.

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Sex Selection Abortion and America's Silent Bigotry

The advent of ultrasound technology is usually considered a boon to the pro-life movement. Ever since its rise to common use, countless lives of unborn children have been saved, as women gaze in wonder at the beautifully formed human beings inside them.

Now, incredibly, the power of the ultrasound is being twisted against the cause of life. Not only can an ultrasound demonstrate the power and beauty of life within the womb, the technology has advanced to the point where is can also give an accurate report on the child's sex. As a result, incredible as it may sound, it is becoming statistically more common for babies to be aborted for that reason.

This problem is rampant in places like India and China, where restrictive reproductive policies are in effect. Families in these countries, prevented from having several children, are desperate to have a boy to assist with the farm’s hard labor, and to care for them in their old age. As a result, girls are often aborted or killed after they are born, which has led to catastrophic sex imbalances in these regions.

According to the UN Population Division, China's modern sex ratio is 94 women to every 100 men, compared to 103 women for every 100 men in the United States, or 104 women for every 100 men in England. India’s statistics are no more comforting. As of 2007, 93 Indian girls were born for every 100 boys. According to further UN reports, sex-selection abortion and infanticide has proven responsible for the loss of at least 60 million girls throughout the world, probably more.

Although China and India have implemented laws that prohibit these sex-selective practices, they have little real impact. Many media sources, including Chinese and Indian ones, have laid the blame of this accelerated sex-balance crisis on China's one-child policy, and rightly so. However, there is a more pervasive problem at work here, a significant shift in people's attitudes that allows there to even be a problem like this in the first place. This problem is not simply restricted to China or India, but is present even in our own country.

Most people in the United States look at sex-selection abortion as being a far-away phenomenon, one that only occurs in backward third-world countries, where obsolete ideas about women and society are still touted as cultural norms. In fact, a poll published in the Presbyterians Pro-Life News shows that 79% of Americans polled believe that abortion should not be legal solely because a woman doesn't like the gender of her child. Sex-selective abortion is rightly seen by many as the ultimate mysogyny, a horrible discrimination against women before they are even born.

Where, then, is the outcry that human rights have been violated? Where is the liberal umbrage against a practice so utterly anti-woman, so boldly oppressive? Where is the feminist activism about a tragedy that even the United Nations is lamenting?

It isn't that American feminists are comfortable with the idea of sex-selective abortions. A few may even quietly denounce the practice from time to time. However, the vast majority of feminists keep a chilly silence on an issue that should be the parade case of the "violence against women" they claim to be against.

The naked truth about feminism and its actual priorities is this: the abortion-on-demand doctrine is so important, so paramount in the minds of feminists, that they are willing to sacrifice their other dearly-held agendas on its altar.

As a result, feminists will often bend over backward to justify or dismiss sex-selection abortion. In a paper entitled "Can Sex Selection Be Ethically Tolerated?", B. M. Dickens argues that sex-selection is "clearly sexual, but not neccesarily sexist . . . To suppose that any such choice is necessarily sexist is unjust, and to base laws introducing criminal penalties on such a supposition . . . is both unjust and oppressive." This paper is available at the Journal of Medical Ethics’ online database here.

B.M Dickens also quotes Susan Sherwin, a feminist author and professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at Dalhousie University. In her book, No Longer Patient: Feminist Ethics and Health Care, she neatly summarizes the feminist outlook on the subject. "Whatever the specific reasons are for abortion," Sherwin states, "most feminists believe that the women concerned are in the best position to judge whether abortion is the appropriate response to pregnancy . . . most feminists agree that women must gain full control over their own reproductive lives if they are to free themselves from male dominance."

It is ironic that the escape from "male dominance" may include, as collateral damage, the wholesale destruction of nearly an entire generation of unborn women. The commitment to abortion is so ingrained that the feminists have become the oppressors. They themselves are perpetrating a violence that is far more widespread, far more sinister than anything they claim to be active against.

It is this bigotry that American pro-lifers are fighting. We understand that there will never be a strong barrier against sex-selective abortion until there is a strong barrier against abortion. It should never be permissible under the law to take an innocent human life for another's convenience. Once it is, however, we should not be surprised when, after a short while, no one even attempts to disguise the fact anymore. Simply put, as it stands now, there is nothing between modern American society and an epidemic of sex-selection abortion save for our own whim. As Alexis de Tocqueville said so many years ago, "the health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens."

With abortion-on-demand, I fear for the future of our democratic society.

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