With the rescue of a newborn baby from a sewage pipe in China causing an international stir, more attention is being paid to China’s one-child policy. What would cause a mother in China to throw her newborn baby down a toilet?
For Chinese women, life with the brutal Chinese one-child policy is something women have dealt with for decades. Dave Andrusko of National Right to Life highlights on particularly brutal story in a recent New York Times column that doesn’t excuse the mother’s actions but helps provide a little more perspective about how women are brutalized in China when they run afoul of the one-child law.
As he writes about the column from Ma Jian:
When you read Jian’s description, it is readily apparent why China has the highest rate of female suicide in the world. In remote areas he met what he described as “’ family-planning fugitives’–couples who’d fled their villages to give birth to an unauthorized second or third child in neighboring provinces.” Virtually every pregnant woman he talked to had suffered a mandatory abortion.
“One woman told me how, when she was eight months pregnant with an illegal second child and was unable to pay the 20,000 yuan fine (about $3,200), family planning officers dragged her to the local clinic, bound her to a surgical table and injected a lethal drug into her abdomen.”
It gets worse.
“For two days she writhed on the table, her hands and feet still bound with rope, waiting for her body to eject the murdered baby. In the final stage of labor, a male doctor yanked the dead fetus out by the foot, then dropped it into a garbage can. She had no money for a cab. She had to hobble home, blood dripping down her legs and staining her white sandals red.”
Occasionally you read hints in press accounts that the Party leadership is reconsidering—perhaps making the policy less stringent. There is much evidence to suggest otherwise plus a factor I had never taken into consider. The fines bring in an enormous amount of money “while allowing it to maintain firm control over people’s lives,” Jian writes.
His conclusion is a searing indictment and a call to action.
“Ending this scourge is a moral imperative. The atrocities committed in the name of the one-child policy over the last three decades rank among the worst crimes against humanity of the last century. The stains it has left on China may never be erased.”
