Members of Congress will hold a hearing tomorrow on the one-child family planning policy China instituted — and it comes just days before the forced abortion-supported policy marks its 31st anniversary.
Congressman Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican who is the pro-life leader in the House of Representatives and the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, and Human Rights, while chair the Thursday hearing. The hearing is titled, “China’s One-Child Policy: The Government’s Massive Crime Against Women and Unborn Babies.”
The hearing will be held in 2200 Rayburn House Office Building and Chai Ling, the founder of All Girls Allowed, and Reggie Littlejohn, the founder of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, are two of the witnesses. They both head groups that have focused on the human rights abuses associated with the one-child policy enforcement in China. Valerie Hudson, Ph.D, a professor in the Department of Political Science at Brigham Young University will also testify at the hearing.
Ling, the woman who, at age 23, was the commander-in-chief of the 1989 Tiananmen Square student rebellion, commented on the upcoming anniversary of the controversial family planning policy. Ling, now a U.S. citizen exiled from China, continues her fight against China’s human rights atrocities by leading a U.S. protest and nationwide campaign against the policy.
“Sept. 25, 2011 marks the continuation of China’s ‘gendercide’ ‘war on girls,'” she said.
Ling says more than 37,000 abortions are done daily in China as family planning officials push many women into them in order to keep population numbers low.
“The One-Child Policy, which limits Chinese families to having just one child, was established in 1980 as a response to an exploding Chinese population. Due to the Chinese preference for male children, sex-selective abortions, female infanticide and the abandonment of female children has become an integral part of Chinese culture over the last 31 years,” she said.
While in Washington, Ling will participate at a September 23 rally, “37 Seconds of Silence,” part of a nationwide vigil organized by All Girls Allowed. From September 22-25, she says more than 200 universities and churches nationwide—including Harvard, Northeastern and Notre Dame—will host 37-second vigils of silence to honor the 37 million girls* missing, through infanticide, abortion or abandonment, due to the Chinese law.
“It is this generation’s responsibility to speak up, and students are beginning to see that,” said Ling. “The good news is, with this kind of momentum, we believe that we can end ‘gendercide’ in our lifetime.”
A victim of China’s One-Child Policy, Ling only recently gained enough closure to share her full story in A Heart for Freedom, which reveals the truth behind her role in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, her status as one of the most-wanted women in China, her own experience with government-forced abortion, and how she escaped to America. Banned from the very country she has long fought to save, Ling’s human rights work has resulted in two nominations for a Nobel Peace Prize and recognition by Glamour magazine as “Woman of the Year.”
The Obama administration has come under heavy criticism regarding the one-child policy and, recently, Vice President Joe Biden was hammered for seeming to condone Chinese-style population control. Answering a question about the one-child policy, he seemed to go out of his way to be noncritical, saying that he “fully understands” the one-child-per-family policy and was not “second-guessing” it.
Biden has condemned the one-child policy in the past and, while a Delaware senator, in 2000, Biden called China’s one-child policy “beyond the pale” in a speech on the Senate floor. “No member of Congress condones the practice of coerced abortion in China or anyplace else,” he said, according to Delaware online.
Yet, Biden was one of 24 Democrats and 53 senators voting to defeat an amendment that year by then-Sen. Jessie Helms, a North Carolina Republican, for a non-binding resolution from the Senate condemning the one-child policy. He claims that doing so would jeopardize trade relations with the large Asian nation.
A spokeswoman for pro-abortion Vice-President Joe Biden may have attempted to walk back comments he made where he failed to criticize the one-child policy in China, but leading pro-life and human rights advocates say it’s not sufficient.
As LifeNews.com reported, Kendra Barkoff told media outlets in an email that Biden and the Obama administration strongly oppose the policy — but the comments are a departure from Biden’s speech, in which he said he would “not second guess” the policy and “fully understands” why China would implement it.
“The Obama Administration strongly opposes all aspects of China’s coercive birth limitation policies, including forced abortion and sterilization,” Barkoff told the conservative news outlet. “The Vice President believes such practices are repugnant.”
That wasn’t good enough for Littlejohn, who will testify at the hearing. She told LifeNews the statement from the Biden spokeswoman is “progress” because it shows “the Obama administration has now publicly admitted it knows that forced abortion and forced sterilization are official “policies” of the Chinese Communist Party, not random acts carried out by overzealous officials.” However, she doesn’t think it’s the case that the Obama administration “strongly opposes” these practices.
“Actions speak louder than words. If the Obama administration “strongly opposes” forced abortion in China, then why did they restore funding to UNFPA,” she asks. The United Nations Family Planning agency has been found to be complicit in the one-child policy in China, yet the Obama administration renewed the taxpayer funding for the agency President George W. Bush revoked.
