China and Abortion

 

China’s Coercive Population Control—Including Forced Abortion—to Continue Despite Plans to Modify Population Policy

Editor’s note. Reports surfaced Thursday that the government will allow married Chinese couples will be allowed not one, but two children. The following comes from the office of pro-life champion Chris Smith (R-NJ)

Pro-Life Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) and Reggie Littlejohn, President, Women’s Rights Without Frontiers

WASHINGTON, DC – “Even if the new policy allows couples to have two children—a claim that remains to be seen—the coercive population control policy is essentially unchanged,” said Rep. Chris Smith, a leading expert on US-China relations in the House of Representatives. “Children will continue to be killed if unauthorized by the government and huge fines imposed—the so-called social compensation fee—on families who evade detection and have so-called illegal children.”
Smith said, “China’s population control program is the most brutal, hated, and disastrous anti-woman, anti-child policy ever.
“Both the old and ‘new’ policies implement forced abortions, involuntary sterilizations and huge fines. These coercive methods result in a gender imbalance favoring males that drives human trafficking problems region-wide,” added Smith, who serves as the Chairman of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China. “It remains highly restrictive because it still limits the size of Chinese families, which means it will be enforced coercively.

“The new policy also needs to be thoroughly vetted for dishonesty,” Smith said. “The Chinese government lies about its human rights record. In 2013 it claimed an end to the horrific ‘Reform Through Labor’ system of detention. But we know now that system has continued under different names.”

Congressman Smith has been a vocal critic of the policy since 1983 and has held 55 hearings on human rights in China and led several fact-finding trips to the communist country. In April, 2015 he chaired a hearing to discuss the disastrous economic, security, and demographic consequences of China’s population control policies (April 30, 2015 CECC hearing).

In a speech given last year on the 34th anniversary of the “one-child policy,” Congressman Smith called it “state-sponsored violence” and said that “forced abortion is a crime against humanity—nothing in human history compares to the magnitude of China’s…assault on women and girls.” Academics and demographic experts have come to similar conclusions about the policy, Wang Feng, the former director of the Brookings-Tsinghua Center, said that “history will judge the “One-Child Policy” as worse than the Cultural Revolution [as it] will influence more than one generation.”
The bipartisan Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) chaired by Smith and co-chaired by Senator Marco Rubio recently released its 2015 Annual Report which shows that Chinese provincial governments continued to coercively enforce birth restrictions and monitor family size. The report also showed that population control policies created a sex ratio imbalance resulting in the birth of significantly more males, millions of whom will be unable to find wives. The severe imbalance drives regional human trafficking throughout Asia for the purposes of forced marriage and sexual exploitation. The CECC Annual Report can be found at www.cecc.gov.

The CECC consists of nine bi-partisan Senators, eight bi-partisan Members of the House of Representatives, and five senior Administration officials appointed by the President. The Annual Report was approved unanimously by all of the CECC’s members.

Source: NRLC News