China’s One-Child Forced Abortion Policy Turns 30 as Congress Holds Hearing
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
November 9, 2009
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — China’s coercive one-child policy that makes it so couples living in the Asian nation can only have one baby marks its thirtieth anniversary this year. As it does, members of Congress plan to hold a hearing on it tomorrow that will reveal new information about how it has hurt women and children and their families.
The policy was instituted at a time when Chinese communist leaders believed the nation’s was growing too large.
However, since the implementation of the one-child family planning policy, millions of women have reportedly faced forced abortions or sterilizations for violating it.
Husbands and partners have been forcibly sterilized as well and violators and their families have been subjected to imprisonment, job less, home detention, fines and other human rights and other kinds of abuses at the hands of local population control officials bent on making their people quotas.
On Tuesday, the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission will hear testimony on human rights abuses connected to China’s one-child policy.
Congressman Chris Smith, the head of the Congressional Pro-Life Caucus, will be present for the meeting and give prepared remarks.
Smith’s office informed LifeNews.com of the meeting and said it would "focus on the policy’s violation of women and the physical and psychological damage it does to them, as well as on the continuation of massive forced abortion campaigns and grossly skewed gender ratios."
Witnesses include leading current authorities on the policy, who will share their latest research and personal experiences with the coercive enforcement of the population planning policy and its effects on Chinese women.
The meeting comes as President Barack Obama heads to China for a November 15 state visit.
Rep. Frank Wolf, a Virginia Republican who is another pro-life advocate who has focused on international abortion issues and China, will also be present for the meeting.
Nicholas Eberstadt, a population control researcher at the American Enterprise Institute, will be present along with Jiang Tianyong of the Beijing Global Law Firm, who is the legal counsel to Chen Guangcheng, the blind attorney who has been imprisoned for exposing forced abortions to the western world.
Longtime China activist Harry Wu and other local China activists will also attend the afternoon hearing.
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