Women
found to be pregnant with an "unapproved" pregnancy are forcibly
aborted, including in the last month of pregnancy. Families found with
children "over-quota" are forced to pay staggering social compensation
fees equaling years of wages and "unauthorized" children can suffer
alienation and denial of education and health benefits.
The
Chinese war on the littlest of women continues through sex-selective
abortion and infanticide, enabled by a cultural preference for males.
Yet, the origins of sex-selective abortion go back to 1969 in the United
States when the Population Council proposed it as an "ethical" way to
control population. In her book Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, Mara Hvistendahl explains:
"By
August 1969, when the National Institute of Child Health and Human
Development and the Population Council convened another workshop on
population control, sex selection had become a pet scheme....Sex
selection, moreover, had the added advantage of reducing the number of
potential mothers....if a reliable sex determination technology could be
made available to a mass market,'' there was "rough consensus'' that
sex selection abortion "would be an effective, uncontroversial and
ethical way of reducing the global population.''
Population
controllers were successful. There are an estimated 160 million females
missing from the world today, mainly in Asia. These missing women will
not become wives, daughter-in-laws, mothers, or grandmothers; they are
not only missing but they are sorely missed. The effects of this
gendercide are particularly felt in China as new and
devastating social, economical and demographic challenges have arisen
from the disproportionate population. China reportedly accounts for 60%
of the world's sex trafficking and tens of millions of men cannot find
wives, leading to an increase of men who seek to purchase women to serve
as a "slave wife".
Marking the anniversary of the policy, Women's Rights Without Frontiers (WRWF) has issued an open letter to China's President Xi Jinping in which WRWF President Reggie Littlejohn calls for an end to the policy:
"The
mayhem caused by China's One Child Policy continues unabated and has
taken some troubling new twists, with people being driven to mental
breakdown, murder and suicide, as well as an obstetrician using her
position of trust in order to trafficbabies. The minor modification of
the Policy that took place on January 1 of this year has failed to solve
these problems. The One Child Policy does not need to be modified. It
needs to be abolished."
In August WRWF filed a complaint
at the United Nations to the Commission on the Status of Women
chronicling cruel and disturbing reports of forced abortion and other
violations of basic human rights emerging from China over the past year.
One report is about an obstetrician in Shaanxi province who "was
convicted of trafficking seven infants, after she had convinced their
parents that the infants were seriously ill or deceased. She was given a
suspended death sentence. It has been estimated that 70,000 children a
year are trafficked in China." In another, "... a husband
demanded compensation from the Chinese government, claiming that his
wife ... has suffered from schizophrenia and violent behavior since she
was forcibly aborted at seven months in November, 2011."
All
Girls Allowed - an organization founded by Tiananmen Square
pro-democracy leader Chai Ling - also marked this anniversary by not
only highlighting ongoing efforts to help save the lives of baby girls
in China but has called attention to the practice of sex selection
abortion in the United States. In Time to End Gendercide in China and in America, Chai Ling expresses
shock and heartbreak that a proposal by San Francisco's Supervisor
David Chiu to lift a ban on sex selective abortion in the city was
approved. She warns that the approval of this resolution "removes a pregnant woman's last weapon she could use to fight for her baby girl's right to live."
She continues, "As
an Asian in America myself, I am not proud of this cultural practice.
However, pretending this practice does not exist does not stop the
brutal slaughter of Asian baby girls and attacks on their mothers;
rather, it condones it and encourages it. If Mr. Chiu truly wants to
show care, to support and protect a woman's freedom to choose, I
challenge Mr. Chiu to openly condemn China's One-Child Policy which
deprives women's basic reproductive rights. Furthermore, instead of
being remembered by history as an Asian man who encourages the killing
of baby girls, I invite Mr. Chiu to join the movement to end
Gendercide!"
PNCI notes that San Francisco is the first city in the USA to prohibit a ban on sex-selective abortion.
A bill - the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act - had been introduced
earlier in the California state assembly but it failed to pass the first
committee vote. Currently eight states in the U.S. have approved bans
on sex-selective abortions.