June 27, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A leading advocate against forced abortions in China is harnessing renewed international interest in the human rights atrocity with a fund aimed at helping victims and putting an end to the Communist country’s coercive population control once and for all.
“The clock has started ticking on China’s forced abortion policy,” Pastor Bob Fu of ChinaAid said in an announcement June 19 at the launch of the Chinese Children Defense Fund.
Officials say the Fund will help hire lawyers to defend families bullied into abortions by population control officials, pay exorbitant fines levied for unauthorized pregnancies, and collect more information about the coercive tactics of China’s one-child policy.
The new initiative is being launched after a stunning photograph of a young Chinese woman lying next to her late-term aborted baby exploded across the world online earlier this month, even prompting China to promise “investigations.” However, the husband of the woman, who posted the photograph on the Internet, is now in hiding, and the woman herself says no investigation is ongoing, and instead the family continues to be harassed for going to the media.
Shortly after that story broke, another Chinese woman came forward to describe her own forced abortion in 2008, when her nearly full-term baby was killed and her womb, cervix, and an ovary removed in a botched sterilization that left her disabled with severe kidney malfunction. When the woman tried to protest the government over the matter, she says the Deputy Minister of the Family Planning Committee responded by saying, “I removed the uteruses of one thousand women, and no one dared to say a word to me.”
A third woman, Cao Ruyi, who is five months pregnant, is currently receiving urgent help from ChinaAid to raise money for a deposit on a massive fine before she is forcibly aborted.
The women’s stories emerged after the high-profile escape of blind lawyer and forced-abortion opponent Chen Guangcheng last month, who fled extra-judicial beatings and home imprisonment by Chinese officials, and arrived in America with his family.
“With the viral response from China’s netizens, the clock has started ticking on China’s forced abortion policy. We stand by ready to help anyone who is victimized in this way,” said Fu, who was a key liaison between Chen and advocates in the United States.
The international community, he said, should pressure the Chinese government “to end a practice that makes modern China look barbaric and backward.”
Click here to donate to the Chinese Children Defense Fund.