One of the leading activists against the one-child policy in China and the forced abortions and other human rights violations that are associated with it is glad Congress will be holding a hearing tomorrow on the practice.
Reggie Littlejohn, the president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, tells LifeNews.com she is glad to be among the panelists testifying before the Committee on Foreign Affairs Congressional Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health and Human Rights tomorrow afternoon.
“The One Child Policy causes more violence against women and girls than any other official policy on earth. It is China’s war on women,” she says.
“Any discussion of women’s rights, or human rights, would be a charade if forced abortion in China is not front and center. It does not matter whether you are pro-life or pro-choice on this issue. No one supports forced abortion, because it is not a choice. The Chinese forced abortion policy is systematic, institutionalized violence against women,” Littlejohn continues.
Littlejohn shared the story of one woman and how she was victimized by a forced abortion and died as a result.
“Liu Dan was 21 years old and 9 months pregnant when family planning police grabbed her out of her home, dragged her to the local family planning office, and forcibly aborted her full term baby,” she recalled. “They already knew from medical tests that she had high blood pressure and that a forced late term abortion would be dangerous for her. After the forced abortion, she lay alone and unconscious in an operating room in the family planning center.”
“Sensing something was wrong, her fiancé burst into the room at 3:00 a.m. to find her bleeding from the eyes, nose, ears and mouth. Even so, the family planning police refused to call for emergency help, until her family insisted. Help arrived too late. Liu Dan died, along with her full term baby,” Littlejohn said.
The activist will also testify regarding blind attorney Chen Guangcheng, who exposed the fact that there were 130,000 forced abortions and involuntary sterilizations in Linyi County in 2005. The Chinese Communist Party imprisoned Chen for four years and has kept him and his family under strict house arrest since September, 2010.
In February, Chen released a video describing the deplorable conditions of his house arrest. The next morning, Chen and his wife, Yuan Weijing, were “beaten senseless.” Chen’s family recently was moved to a “personal prison” built for them.
“This treatment of Chen is unconscionable. It shows the appalling lengths to which the CCP will go to silence a hero who has spoken up against forced abortion in China,” Littlejohn said.
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, will 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, will testify with Littlejohn.
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.
“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.
