China Newspaper: Official Wrong on Reversing Forced Abortion One-Child Policy 
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by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
March 3, 2008
Beijing, China (LifeNews.com) — A Chinese newspaper says a family planning official spoke out of turn last week when he said the Asian nation was considering slowly reversing its one-child population control policy that has resulted in forced abortions and sterilizations. The Beijing News called the official’s comments "inconsistent with the facts."
Vice Minister of the National Population and Family Planning Commission Zhao Baige told reporters about the supposed plan on Wednesday.
"We want incrementally to have this change," he said.
"I cannot answer at what time or how, but this has become a big issue among decision makers," Zhao added. "The attitude is to do the studies, to consider it responsibly and to set it up systematically."
While LifeNews.com reported that officials were only examining the policy change but had not officially announced its intent to do so, some news agencies reported the change as gospel truth.
On Sunday, the Beijing News reported that National Population and Family Planning Commission’s publicity and education department told it that the original news reports were erroneous.
"China will continue to pursue even better its population and family planning policy," the report said.
The "reversal" is not a surprise to Anthony Ozimic, the political secretary for the British-based Society for the Protection of Unborn Children.
He told LifeNews.com shortly after the initial news stories that he doubted their veracity.
"Western media outlets are disseminating misinformation by the Chinese Communist regime allegedly implying that China might scrap or significantly relax its one-child, forced-abortion population control policy," he said.
He blamed Reuters and the London Guardian for reporting the decision was a certainty, even though "nothing in the minister’s comments suggests such a move."
Ozimic told LifeNews.com he thinks the whole incident was nothing more than Chinese officials trying to obfuscate the truth about the country’s human rights record in advance of the 2008 Summer Olympics.
"Experts know that the Chinese Communist regime makes misleading statements about human rights when the international spotlight is on China," he said. "Such statements are intended for Western consumption only and specifically designed to mislead Westerners into wishful thinking that the regime’s crimes against humanity, such as the one-child policy, are coming to an end."
Ozimic also chided the Guardian newspaper for reporting that the one-child policy’s enforcement is far less punitive than in the 1980s and early 1990s.
That’s despite considerable human rights abuses such as a mass campaign of forced abortions and sterilizations in Linyi, China that involved more than 10,000 women. Attorney Chen Guangcheng exposed the abuses to the world and was subsequently arrested, jailed and beaten.
"After the Olympics, the Western media should conduct on-the-ground investigations into the one-child policy’s implementation," Ozimic concluded. "They’ll discover the reality of continuing forced abortions rather than the myths the Communist regime has led them to believe."
Related web sites:
Society for the Protection of Unborn Children – https://www.spuc.org.uk
