China Shows No Signs of Abandoning One-Child Abortion Policy

International   |   Steven Ertelt   |   Mar 3, 2013   |   5:53PM   |   Beijing, China

Last week, some rumblings in the international community included rumors that China may be looking at abandoning its one-child policy. Reggie Littlejohn of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers emailed LifeNews to confirm that is no the case.

The fact that the Chinese Communist Party is considering the possibility of folding the family planning agency into the Ministry of Health is an inadequate basis on which to herald the end of the One Child Policy. There is no mention of the eradication of the policy; merely the streamlining of its administration.
Littlejohn said rumors that the policy may be ending ignore the fact that a top family planning official dashed hopes that the One Child Policy will be abolished, or even modified significantly, any time soon.
“We must unwaveringly adhere to the One Child Policy as a national policy to stabilize the low birth rate as the primary task,” stated Wang Xia, Chairman the National Population and Family Planning Commission, at a national conference on January 14, 2013.

Wang Xia further stated, “We need to keep the One-child policy and keep the national birth rate low . . . It’s our priority.”

Chinese national media quoted expert opinions that “the current low birthrate is not stable, except for a few very advanced major cities. In most areas of the nation, if they were to give up the One Child Policy, the current low birthrate would definitely rebound significantly. Therefore, in order to stabilize the low birthrate, it is necessary to hold on to the One Child Policy as a basic national policy,” according to a Zhong Xin China News Agency report.

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Littlejohn said reports of a two-child policy mean forced abortions continue.

Instituting a two-child policy will not end forced abortion. The problem with the One Child Policy is not the number of children “allowed.” Rather, it is the fact that the CCP is telling women how many children they can have and then enforcing that limit through forced abortion, forced sterilization and infanticide. Even if all couples were allowed two children, there is no guarantee that the CCP will cease their appalling methods of enforcement. Regardless of the number of children allowed, women who get pregnant without permission will still be dragged out of their homes, strapped down to tables and forced to abort babies that they want, even up to the ninth month of pregnancy. 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.

Instituting a two-child policy will not end gendercide. Indeed, areas in which two children currently are allowed are especially vulnerable to gendercide, the sex-selective abortion of females. According to the 2009 British Medical Journal study of 2005 national census data, in nine provinces, for “second order births” where the first child is a girl, 160 boys were born for every 100 girls. In two provinces, Jiangsu and Anhui, for the second child, there were 190 boys for every hundred girls born. This study stated, “Sex selective abortion accounts for almost all the excess males.” Because of this gendercide, there are an estimated 37 million Chinese men who will never marry because their future wives were terminated before they were born. This gender imbalance is a powerful, driving force behind trafficking in women and sexual slavery, not only in China, but in neighboring nations as well.

The Chinese Communist Party periodically modifies the One Child Policy, but the coercion at its core remains. Reports of these tweaks — especially when amplified by western media — throw the human rights world into confusion and blunt genuine efforts to end forced abortion in China. On September 9, 2010, for example, TIME ran the headline, “China Could Overthrow One-Child Rule.” Myriad other news sources followed suit. This dramatic headline was based on the fact that China proposed to run a pilot program allowing some couples to have two children. Soon afterwards, on September 25, 2010 – the 30th anniversary of the One Child Policy – a top population control official praised the policy and stated that China “will stick to the family planning policy in the coming decades.” Moreover, despite this pilot program, numerous reports of late-term forced abortions have surfaced since 2010, including the forced abortion at seven months of Feng Jianmei in June 2012.