The Associated Press reported on October 21 that government officials in China had taken a woman from her home during her eighth month of pregnancy and forcibly aborted her baby. The report cited a statement made by the woman’s husband, Luo Yanquan — identified as a construction worker — who said that his wife “was taken kicking and screaming from their home by more than a dozen people on October 10 and detained in a clinic for three days by family planning officials, then taken to a hospital and injected with a drug that killed her baby.”
The AP report cited a statement from an official with the Siming district family planning commission, the agency that regulates pregnancies in Luo's neighborhood, who confirmed there was a record of Luo's wife, Xiao Aiying, undergoing an abortion recently but claimed that the procedure was voluntary. The same official, who refused to give his name, also claimed that Xiao was about six months pregnant at the time, instead of the eight months reported by the couple.
According to AP, the government official also asserted that Xiao's husband had approved the abortion, a claim Luo refutes. "I never signed anything. No one in our family did," he told AP by telephone from Xiamen. "I called the police but they said family planning issues weren't their responsibility. I want to sue, but lawyers I've asked here say they can't help me and the media won't report on our case."
Under China’s “one-child” policy, couples who have more than one child without government permission typically pay stringent fines, have their property seized, or lose their jobs. However, the government officially claims that forced abortions are banned.
The Middle East-based al Jazeera news network also reported on the forced abortion on October 20, and noted that “China's one-child policy leads to an estimated 13 million reported abortions every year, with many of those ordered by the authorities enforcing the system.” The report continued:
Al Jazeera's Melissa Chan gained access to a hospital in the southeastern city of Xiamen, where she found one mother in a terrible condition.
Xiao Ai Ying was forced to have an abortion eight months into her pregnancy because she already has a ten-year-old girl....
Al Jazeera approached Chinese authorities in Xiamen for comment on this story, but they declined to speak to the Middle East news organ’s reporter.
At this point, this writer must depart from a straight summary of this incident and delve into opinion, a transition fueled by the sheer outrageousness of the oppressive Chinese regime’s ongoing policy of infanticide. For what else can it be called? If a woman gives birth in the eight month of pregnancy, the near-fully-formed baby is completely viable. Does its killing in the womb make it any less human or its murder any less appalling?
Even worse, the government of the United States is complicit in this policy, through trade policies that have encouraged U.S. investment in China, the sale of an enormous amount of U.S. government debt to the murderous Red regime, and polices that furthermore accelerate the outsourcing of U.S. jobs to China.
The successive communist regimes that have ruled China since the violent takeover of that hapless nation by the ruthless tyrant Mao tse tung in 1949 (helped by U.S. abandonment of the Nationalist Chinese) have been estimated by Professor R.J. Rummel, author of Death by Government, to have killed 38,702,000 to 76,702,000 of their own people.
Today’s Chinese communist rulers are “moderate” only in comparison to their former heinous track record. A Wikipedia article entitled “Human rights in the People's Republic of China” observes:
Numerous human rights organizations maintain a litany of grievances against the Chinese government. Controversial human rights issues in China include policies such as capital punishment, the one-child policy, the social status of Tibetans, and lack of protections regarding freedom of press and religion. One of the foremost areas of concern is a lack of legal rights, for want of an independent judiciary, rule of law, and due process. Another prominent area of concern is lack of labor rights, which is related to the hukou system, the absence of independent unions, and discrimination against rural workers and ethnic minorities. Yet another area of concern is the lack of religious freedom, highlighted by state clashes with Christian, Tibetan Buddhist, and Falun Gong groups. Some indigenous groups are trying to expand these freedoms; they are Human Rights in China, Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) and China Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group (CHRLCG).
One can hardly walk into any store in American today without finding the shelves dominated with products labeled “Made in China.” In view of China’s long history of complete disregard for human rights, including genocide and infanticide, our people’s calm acceptance of this overwhelming, one-sided trade with China suggests that a large percentage of our population is either apathetic to the point of being semi-comatose, or has completely lost its sense of moral outrage.
As someone recently reminded this writer, however, how much moral indignation can Americans muster against the Chinese when 52 million abortions have been performed in the United States since the Supreme Court’s Roe v Wade decision?
We can take scarce comfort in the fact that abortion in the United States at least has not been made compulsory — yet. However, just to reassure ourselves, we searched and found the following article in the Washington Examiner, “Obama's science czar suggested compulsory abortion, sterilization.”
The writer quotes from a 1977 book, Ecoscience, by President Obama's Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, John Holdren and coauthored by Paul and Anne Ehrlich:
Responsible parenthood ought to be encouraged and illegitimate childbearing could be strongly discouraged. One way to carry out this disapproval might be to insist that all illegitimate babies be put up for adoption — especially those born to minors, who generally are not capable of caring properly for a child alone...It would even be possible to require pregnant single women to marry or have abortions, perhaps as an alternative to placement for adoption, depending on the society. [Emphasis added.]
Our principal conclusion from this is a promise to self never to say “It can’t happen here.”