WASHINGTON, D.C., July 9, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) – “China’s one-child policy constitutes the longest-running and most far-reaching violation of human rights the world has ever seen,” Steven Mosher, the president of Population Research Institute, told a Congressional hearing this afternoon. Before the event was over, the chamber got to see the face of but one victim of the thousands of forced abortions Chinese officials perform everyday while carrying out Beijing’s one-child policy.
Guo Yanling was kidnapped by Chinese Family Planning Commission workers in 1995 while she was nearly eight months pregnant with her third child. Frightened villagers ignored her cries for help as she was pushed into a van, gagged, and driven to the Second People’s Hospital of Nanning. There, she said, she was held down by “killers in white.”
“After the person in white pressed my belly with her hands and felt the position of my baby’s head, she stuck a big, long, fatal needle deep into my abdomen,” she told the panel. Her child’s body was placed in a plastic bag near her, allowing her to see that she had been expecting a boy. After being told to stop fussing, she eventually gained the strength to walk out of her room.
She watched the doctors who stealthily moved from room to room, quickly performing an abortion, then “leaving immediately after each killing.”
As she left the hospital Yanling, who is a Christian, saw “a big basket full of the bodies of dead newborns and trash.”
Her testimony gave the House Committee on Foreign Affairs a human face to match the countless, anonymous women abused by the nation’s family planning system.
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Bob Fu, president of ChinaAid, told the committee Yanling’s story , although tragic, was anything but unusual.
Fu and Reggie Littlejohn of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers reminded the House of the recent stories of Cao Ruyi, who was released after international pressure but remains in danger; Feng Jianmei, who is still being kept in a hospital “prison” after her full-term baby was forcibly aborted; Hu Xia, forcibly aborted at nearly eight months; and Zhang Weng Fang, who went public with her own 2008 forced abortion and sterilization to assure “no more families ever have to go through what I have been through.”
Mosher said PRI’s investigative teams visited five provinces in China, logging 80 hours of interview that prove Beijing is lying about its coerced policies. He said minorities – such as the Manchus, Uyghurs, and Tibetans – are not exempt from the one-child policy as the government claims, and family planning officials overseen such abuses as “the abduction and selling of ‘illegal’ children” or threatening to demolish villagers’ homes if they do not pay astronomical fines for having more than one child.
Fines, he said, can run as high as nine times an family’s annual income. In one town posted regulations warn, “couples that already have a second or higher order child shall be sterilized.”
Much of this took place in counties the UN Population Fund deemed models. “UNFPA’s claims that it is a moderating force in China do not accord with the reality of its complicity in coercion,” he said.
Those who testified called on the Obama administration to pressure China to end quotas for abortion, to prosecute the officials responsible for Feng Jianmei’s abortion, not allow population control officials to travel to the United States, hold U.S. corporations with factories in China responsible for cooperating with the brutal regime, and to make sure no U.S. funds help facilitate forced abortion.
They also asked Congress to pass a resolution similar to the one the European Parliament adopted condemning China’s actions.
Littlejohn – who cited LifeSiteNews.com in her Congressional testimony – said, “Whether you are pro-life or pro-choice, no one supports forced abortion, because it is not a choice.”
However, the UNFPA and the International Planned Parenthood Federation “have worked hand-in-hand with the Chinese population control machine,” she said.
While Americans assess what pressure they can bring to bear from without, Bob Fu said China is changing from within. He observed that both Feng Jianmei and her husband are Christians, as are the lawyers representing them.
“In Chinese society, where political corruption and bankrupt moral ethics prevail, the Christian faith is providing strong support to the people’s pursuit of justice and love – and is also giving them the courage to stand up to evil forces,” he said.
Monday’s hearing took place before the Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, and Human Rights, which is chaired by Rep. Chris Smith, R-NJ.
Fu said Congressman Smith’s actions “will be remembered in the history of human rights in China and around the world.”
Full testimony is available here.