YUNNAN PROVINCE, CHINA, September 9, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – A public outcry has been raised in China in response to the plight of a woman facing state sanctions for bearing her second child in violation of the country's one-child policy. She has complained to the international news media as pressure mounts on her to abort the child or see her husband fired.
The 41-year-old woman, who talked to reporters on condition that they use only her common surname, Chen, faces not only fines and other state sanctions in her home province of Yunnan, but the loss of her husband's job as a policeman. She is caught in a quandary, because there is a law against abortion, albeit containing many loopholes, as well.
According to the Associated Press, Wen Xueping, a Yunnan family planning officer, said the family will not be forced to abort their child but have been warned they face fines and firing. He also reported receiving many complaints about the threatened sanctions.
As with many policies in China, the one-child policy is unevenly enforced: in some rural areas, especially when the first child is female, exemptions may be purchased. But in others, the policy is enforced with brutality. Two years ago, the government allowed 11 million couples to have a second child and admitted earlier this year that 470,000 babies were born as a result.
China has reversed its family planning policies several times. After encouraging big families for decades, China instituted its one-child policy in 1980, according to the All Girls Wanted website, after dictator Mao Tse-Tung's failed economic policies resulted in a massive famine killing 30 million. In the spirit of an era that spawned the anti-growth Club of Rome and Paul Ehrlich's anti-people classic The Population Bomb, the one-child policy ultimately was credited with reducing China's population below projections by 400 million and instigating 336 million abortions (and nearly 200,000 sterilizations).
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Moreover, All Girls Wanted claims in a fact sheet (as do many other organizations) that the policy exacerbates a cultural preference for males (because males are given the responsibility of caring for parents in their old age). “The policy causes parents to get rid of daughters through abortion, abandonment, or infanticide.” Adds the fact sheet: “This elimination of girls is called gendercide. Experts predict that by 2020, China will be home to 40 million more men than women.”
Steven Mosher of the Population Research Institute told a 1999 conference on human rights in China that the regime uses such means as cutting off electricity to the home, fining the mother (ostensibly for the additional expenses the second child will cost the state), locking her up, subjecting her to day-long brainwashing sessions from party officials, firing her, and burning the home while other women of child-bearing age are forced to watch. “As long as the pregnant women walk the last few steps to the local medical clinic under their own power,” said Mosher, “then the abortions that follow are said by the government to be 'voluntary.'”
Occasionally, party officials and local police physically restrain the pregnant woman in her own home or a clinic while the abortion is performed on her and her child using the crudest of methods: pushing on her belly to induce premature birth.
Post-birth deterrents include refusing the new baby a residence permit and, while medical expenses for other family members are free, requiring parents to pay for those for the second child.
The one-child policy has had a deleterious effect on Chinese women's health. A 2013 meta-study of data from three dozen hospitals in 14 Chinese provinces showed that women who had one abortion got breast cancer 44% more often than women who had no abortions. Women with two abortions got breast cancer 76% more often, and women with three abortions got it 89% more often.
The Chens are not alone in their opposition, according to the Associated Press. The nation's social media channels are alive with the debate, which is concerned not only with individual rights, but with the demographics of a country with few young people left to support many grandparents. Already Mr. Chen has a job offer, reports the state-owned organ, The Paper. A travel agency has offered to hire him.
