Yesterday, China marked 36 years of the one-child family planning policy — which recently became a two-child population control policy — that has resulted in massive human rights abuses, including forced abortions and coercive sterilizations.
Started in 1980, the policy, which prohibits most Chinese couples form having more than one baby and limits rural residents to two, has resulted in severe human rights abuses. Family planning officials frequently jail couples who refuse to comply, sentence them to house arrest or labor camps, revoke jobs or governmental support, use physical harassment or violence and often target other family members.
The policy is unlike any other in the world in that it requires all women to obtain a birth permit before becoming pregnant and children of unwed mothers are subjected to abortions. And it monitors the reproductive cycles of all women of childbearing age through a system of mandatory, regular, and crudely invasive physical check-ups.
According to Reggie Littlejohn, President of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, China aborts tens of millions of babies every year.
“The One Child Policy has been responsible for hundreds of millions of forced abortions and sterilizations and untold human suffering,” she said.
Littlejohn told LifeNews.com that, according to the most recent State Department Report, the number of abortions in a year has increased from 13 to 23 million a year. In the past, the Chinese government reported 13 million abortions a year.
The 2015 State Department Report noted that according to official Chinese sources, “The number of abortions performed is believed to be higher,” because the statistics in the past were collected only from registered medical institutions and did not include abortions at unregistered clinics.
The State Department Report, however, states that an “official [Chinese] news media outlet” has reported that “at least an additional 10 million chemically induced abortions were performed in nongovernmental facilities.”
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Adding abortions of official and unofficial facilities results in 23 million abortions a year. 23 million abortions a year comes to 63,013 abortions a day, 2625 abortions an hour, 43 per minute. The United States population is about 320 million, with about 1 million abortions per year. The population of China is almost 1.4 billion, with about 23 million abortions per year. Therefore China, with four times the population of the United States, has 23 times the number of abortions.
According to the State Department Report, the Chinese government did not provide a statistic on how many of these abortions were forced.
“One out of every five women in the world lives in China. The women of the world will not be free until the women of China are free,” she told LifeNews.
In China, abortion has little to do with a woman’s choice. The world was shocked in 2012 when the photograph of Feng Jianmei lying next to her forcibly aborted baby emerged through Women’s Rights Without Frontiers into Western media, showing millions the true face of Chinese population control.
Forced abortion continues under China’s new Two Child Policy. On July 22, 2016, for example, a Guangdong couple was told they must have an abortion or both lose their government jobs. The wife was eight months pregnant.
