BEIJING, CHINA, May 1, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – As Chinese human rights activist Chen Guangcheng’s story finally reaches the international stage with his escape to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing last week, one of his advocates in America wants to remind the world that the atrocities he was beaten and imprisoned for opposing – brutal forced abortions against China’s women under the one-child policy – are ongoing.
Reggie Littlejohn of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers received Chen’s field notes on the extent of the abuses and released them in English at a U.S. Congressional hearing last year.
“In 2006 Chen exposed the Chinese government’s systematic, massive use of forced abortion and involuntary sterilization to enforce its ‘one child policy,’” said Littlejohn.
The Chen Guangcheng Report can be read here.
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A member of Chen’s team, human rights attorney Teng Biao, drafted this 2005 investigative report into coercive family planning in Linyi City, Shandong Province. The report contains extensive witness statements from cases Chen and his team were investigating before Chen was jailed. In the report are detailed accounts regarding:
- A woman forcibly aborted and sterilized at seven months;
- Villagers sleeping in fields to evade Family Planning Officials;
- Family planning officials who broke three brooms over the head of an elderly man;
- Family planning officials who forced a grandmother and her brother to beat each other; and
- The use of quota systems and the practice of “implication” – the detention, fining and torture of the extended family of One Child Policy “violators.”
“The Chen Guangcheng report makes clear the spirit of the Red Guards lives on in China’s Family Planning death machine,” said Littlejohn. “WRWF released the names of the perpetrators of these crimes against humanity, so that they can be held accountable before the world.”
Just last month, the brutality of the policy received heightened attention after a photograph of a Linyi woman’s baby, forcibly aborted at full term and floating in the bucket in which it was drowned, surfaced. The photo circulated widely on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, eliciting widespread outrage.
WRWF also called attention to reports relating to the One Child Policy from last year: in April 2011, Family Planning Officials stabbed a man to death when attempting to seize his sister for a forced sterilization; and in October 2011, a woman, six months pregnant, died during a forced abortion in Lijing County, also in Shandong Province.
“Chen may be safe for the moment, but the women for whom he risked everything are not,” said Littlejohn. “Forced abortion is not a choice. It is official government rape.”
A petition calling on China to free Chen Guangcheng can be viewed here.