China’s One-Child Policy
China’s Harsh Enforcement of One-Child Policy
Congressional hearing finds tragedy and ominous signs in
China’s one-child policy
By Gary Feuerberg
September 27, 2011
A woman cycles pass a billboard encouraging couples to have only one
child, along a road leading to a village in the suburb of Beijing, 25 March
2001. (Goh Chai Hin/AFP/Getty Images)WASHINGTON—Pregnant women
lacking birth permits are hunted down like criminals by population planning
police in China and forcibly aborted. The degree of monitoring and coercion
of ordinary women in their reproductive lives in communist China is shocking
to persons living in the free world. In a congressional hearing chaired by
Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.4), Sept. 22, several victims of communist China’s
one-child policy testified to their experiences of coercion and involuntary
abortion.
“For over three decades, brothers and sisters have been illegal; a mother
has absolutely no right to protect her unborn baby from state-sponsored
violence,” said Rep. Smith, who in his 30-year congressional career has
chaired 29 congressional human rights hearings focused in whole or in part
on China’s one-child policy.
The policy was introduced in 1978, and Chinese authorities say it will
remain in place until at least 2015, said Valerie Hudson, political science
professor at Brigham Young University. The regime claims the policy has
prevented 400 million births from 1979 to 2011.
Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers,
testified to 13 new cases of coercion in a report her organization released
on the day of the hearing. Littlejohn described cases of forced abortion
(including one woman at eight months and another carrying twins at eight and
a half months), forced sterilization, forced contraception, the use of
abortion and sterilization quotas, family planning jail cells, the
demolition of homes (even for missing a pregnancy check), and the use of
collective punishment by demolishing homes and fining relatives of the
“violators.”
State Surveillance
The close monitoring of the Family Planning Commission could be seen in
the testimony of Ping Liu. In the 1980s, the practice was to have an
intrauterine device (IUD) implanted after giving birth to one’s first child.
But because Liu had swelling in her right kidney, the doctors did not
implant the IUD; instead they said that she should use other contraceptive
methods.
Congressman Chris Smith (R-N.J.) held a hearing Sept. 22 on China's
one-child policy with new testimony. Congressman Smith deplored the
extreme surveillance, forced abortions and sterilizations, and coercion
of Chinese women of childbearing age. (Gary Feuerberg/The Epoch Times)
“Without the IUD, I became the prime target for surveillance by the
factory’s Family Planning Commission,” she said. In the factory where she
worked, workers monitored each other, and were suspicious and hostile to
each other because of the threat of collective punishment. Two of her
pregnancies were reported by her colleagues to the Family Planning
Commission.
“When discovered, pregnant women would be dragged to undergo forced
abortions—there simply was no other choice. We had no dignity as potential
child-bearers.”
Liu said that every month during their menstrual period, women had to
undress in front of the birth-planning doctor for examination. "We were
allowed to collect a salary only after it was confirmed that we were not
pregnant,” she said.
From 1983 to 1990, because of the one-child policy, Liu was forced to
have five abortions.
Ling Chai personally testified to the situation of being pregnant and not
married. She said China’s one-child policy is a “one-child per couple”
policy. “It is the ‘all other children must die’ policy,” she said. The
policy means most married couples will not be allowed to have more than one
child and unmarried women are not allowed to have babies at all. She told
how she, unmarried, became pregnant at age 18, and had no choice but to
abort; in her second pregnancy she was forced to abort a second time.
In her third pregnancy, she and her boyfriend wanted to get married, but
in China, that didn’t help save her child. In order to marry, the combined
age of a couple must be 48.
Even if they could wed, without a birth permit, no baby was allowed, she
said.
Chai’s fourth abortion shows an insidious side of the one-child policy. Chai
was in Paris, and no longer faced the threat of the state’s forced abortion
policy. She was married and no longer had to hide the pregnancy in shame.
“Still I carried the mindset of China that abortion was the right choice if
the circumstances made keeping the baby difficult,“ Chai said.
Threats Didn’t Stop Couple
Witness Yeqing Ji had one daughter and wanted very much to have a second
child. Pressure also came from the husband’s family that strongly desired a son.
After the birth
of her daughter, she agreed to the Planning Commission to get the IUD,
but she never did.
She learned at her gynecological clinic that she was pregnant. The next day,
four agents from the Planning Commission visited Ji and told her she had to get
an abortion. Otherwise, the couple would we fined 200,000 yuan ($31,300), which
was more than three times their combined annual income. In addition, they also
would be fired from their jobs. “We were very afraid at the time about losing
our jobs,” and could not pay the exorbitant fee. So, she underwent an abortion.
The next time she learned she was pregnant, five planning commission agents
soon came to her home, but this time she told them they were determined to have
the child and would pay the fine. However, she was told the second child was
forbidden.
Ji said, "Even if it was born, the child could not be registered and would
not be able to attend school. More than the fines, we would be fired from our
jobs with a child that would never be registered by the census. But this time we
were not afraid. We were willing to take the punishment
of fines and losing our jobs. It wasn’t as important to us as our child."
Ji’s husband could not stop the agents from dragging his wife away and the
abortion forced upon her. “After the abortion, I felt empty, as if something was
scooped out
of me. My husband and I had been so excited for our new baby. Now,
suddenly, all that hope and joy and excitement had disappeared, all in an
instant.”
Missing Girls and ‘Bare Branches’
China’s
one-child
policy
is having serious demographic and social consequences. Limiting most
couples to one child means there are relatively fewer youth and more aged. Dr.
Hudson drew on a study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies
that found the ratio
of working age adults (15-59) to the elderly (60 and above) was
declining, resulting in fewer workers to support the old. In 1980, the ratio was
7.7 adults to one elderly person. In 2010, the ratio is 5.4 and by 2030, it is
projected to be 2.5.
Because
of a traditional preference for boys in China, the
one-child
policy
has led to “gendercide”
of girls. This fact can be inferred from the lopsided sex ratios in
China.
“The Chinese government states that its birth sex ratio is slightly over 118
(2010 census results), though some Chinese scholars have gone on record as
stating the birth sex ratio is at least 121-122,” said Dr. Hudson, who noted
that the birth sex ratios for the rest
of the world (excluding Oceania) range from 103.1 (Europe) to 99.5
(Africa).
Not only China, but India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Taiwan, and South
Korea show a gender imbalance caused by a preference for males and “a
devaluation
of female life,” said Hudson.
“There are at least 90 million missing women in Asia, and over 10 percent
of young adult men in these nations will be hard pressed to form
traditional families
of their own,“ Hudson said.
“For every daughter culled from the population, a son will become ‘surplus’—or
in colloquial Chinese, a ‘bare branch’ on the family tree. Our estimates are
that by the year 2020, young adult bare branches (ages 15-34) will number
approximately 23 million–25 million in China alone, which constitutes 13 percent
of this young adult male population.”Unattached young adult males are
much more likely to engage in anti-social behavior than married young adult
males. As the population
of unattached males increases, China will be confronted with increases in
crime, violent crime, crimes against women, vice, substance abuse, and the
formation
of gangs, Hudson said.
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/china-news/chinas-harsh-enforcement-of-one-child-policy-62111.html