Last week, the Washington Times carried a powerful op-ed by Robert Zubrin, a senior fellow the Center for Security Policy, tracing the intellectual roots of China’s brutal one-child policy to the population-control movement including the Club of Rome.
(The author has a longer article in the The New Atlantis which is an excerpt from his recently published book on this topic.) Zubrin’s op-ed contains this chilling description of the policy in action:
Thus began the most forceful population-control program since Nazi Germany. Qian Xinzhong, a Soviet-trained former major general in the People’s Liberation Army, was placed in charge of the campaign. He ordered all women with one child to have a stainless steel IUD inserted and to be inspected regularly to make sure they had not tampered with it. To remove the device was deemed a criminal act. All parents with two or more children were to be sterilized. No pregnancies were legal for anyone under 23, whether married or not, and all unauthorized pregnancies were to be aborted.
Women who defied these injunctions were taken and sterilized by force. Babies would be aborted right through the ninth month of pregnancy, with many crying as they were being stabbed to death at the moment of birth. Those women who fled to try to save their children were hunted, and if they could not be caught, their houses were torn down, and their parents thrown in prison, there to linger until a ransom of 20,000 yuan – about three years’ income for a peasant – was paid for their release.
[The description continues….] It was this mind-boggling abuse of women that the blind human right’s activist, Chen Guangcheng, documented and pursued leading to his arrest by Chinese authorities. It is hard to imagine the extent of the police state needed to enforce such a policy.
China still mandates the one-child policy – this is not part of the past but the present.
LifeNews Note: Dr. Chris Gacek is the Senior Fellow, Regulatory Affairs at Family Research Council. Dr. Gacek received a Bachelors of Science in economics from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, a Masters and Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University, and a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law.
