Trump Admin Should Investigate Planned Parenthood for Promoting Forced Abortions in China

Opinion | Reggie Littlejohn | Nov 30, 2016 | 7:37PM | Beijing, China

Dear President-Elect Trump:

Congratulations on your election. We at Women’s Rights Without Frontiers look forward to working with you to advance women’s rights all over the world. To that end, we respectfully request that you immediately investigate International Planned Parenthood. If they are found to be complicit with coercive population control in China – as we believe they will be — we request that you defund them.

As you may know, China’s One Child (now Two Child) Policy has been responsible for hundreds of millions of forced abortions and sterilizations and untold human suffering. While posturing as a champion of choice, International Planned Parenthood has in fact been working hand in hand with the population control program in China, almost since its inception. Forced abortion is not a choice.

Women’s Rights Without Frontiers calls for a full-scale investigation of International Planned Parenthood to determine the exact nature of its operations in China. Transparency is demanded by the fact that IPPF receives taxpayer dollars from the United States and other nations as well. I believe it is impossible to partner so closely with the Chinese Communist Party’s forced abortion machine without being complicit in its atrocities. This is especially the case when this year we learned that the number of abortions in China is not 13 million, but a staggering 23 million a year.

In China, abortion has little to do with a woman’s choice. The world was shocked in 2012 when the graphic 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. On October 28, 2016, the BBC ran a groundbreaking report, interviewing a family currently in hiding to give birth to their third child. The father stated, “If we weren’t in hiding, they would have forced us to have an abortion.”

Perhaps the best way to grasp the devastation of forced abortion is to watch our short video, Stop Forced Abortion: China’s War Against Women https://www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org/?nav=stop-forced-abortion

When the China Family Planning Association (CFPA) was first created in 1980, the official communique stated its purpose was to “implement government population control policies.” The International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) partnered with the CFPA as its main access to China beginning in 1983, when abuses under the then-new One-Child Policy were at their height. `

In its first decade, in collaboration with IPPF, CFPA established one million branches in China and mobilized as many as 94 million members and volunteers “all over the country.” In fact, China was the second country to become officially recognized as a qualified member of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), after CFPA met IPPF’s 65 criteria on sexual and reproductive health issues.

Nor is this collaboration on International Planned Parenthood’s part an artifact of the past.

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Today IPPF is still CFPA’s main partner, and IPPF has gone on record praising China’s notoriously coercive policy.

In 2009, IPPF director-general Gill Greer, called China’s One-Child Policy “very conducive to China’s development in various aspects,” including the realm of “health care services.”
In a 2011 letter to the editor, former Planned Parenthood Executive Vice President Norman Fleishman called China’s One Child Policy a “start” to curbing global population. At about this time IPPF’s website affirmed that it “supports the present family planning policy of the government” and that their Chinese arm “plays a very important role in China’s family planning programme.”

China’s family planning office, in turn, has expressed the importance of international cooperation and has “offered to provide population management training and contraceptive supplies to developing countries” – thus attempting to spread its abusive system.

IPPF’s site still points to CFPA as its main operations hub in China and has recently publicized its good relationship with the Chinese government. In 2013, following a change in China’s leadership, IPPF described its meeting with new Chinese premier Li Kequiang and mutual plans to “strengthen the partnership” between China and IPPF.

If International Planned Parenthood stands for ‘choice,’ then why are they working hand in hand with the Chinese Communist Party’s coercive population control machine?

Further, according to the most recent State Department Report, the annual number of abortions in China has increased from 13 to 23 million a year. Twenty-three 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.

Americans and the international community have a stake in this problem because our tax money helps fund it. According to a March 2015 report from the United States Government Accountability Office, International Planned Parenthood has received U.S. taxpayer dollars. According to its own financial report, International Planned Parenthood receives funds from other governments, the United Nations Family Planning Fund (UNFPA), and private foundations as well.

To the extent that the United States and other western governments are financing IPPF through taxpayer money without requiring transparency or accountability regarding IPPF’s operations in China, the blood of Chinese women and babies is on our hands. We call upon the Chinese government to cease all coercive population control. We also call upon the United States and other governmental bodies to stop using taxpayer money to collaborate with coercive population control in China through IPPF’s long-standing partnership with the brutal China Family Planning Association. Rather, they should launch a full-scale investigation of IPPF’s operations in China.

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.

President-Elect Trump, you are in a unique position to defund IPPF. We look forward to the day when US Taxpayer dollars are no longer used to support the coercive population control machine in China.

With best wishes,

Reggie Littlejohn

Reggie Littlejohn, President
Women’s Rights Without Frontiers