“Reports that the Chinese Party-State has ended its practice of forcibly aborting women pregnant in violation of the one-child policy are premature,” says Steven Mosher, President of the Population Research Institute.
Mosher, who blew the whistle on forced abortions in China back in 1980, points out that “The Chinese Party-State has asserted for over three decades that the one-child policy is ‘entirely voluntary.’ But this assertion of ‘voluntarism’ is no more true now than it was when I saw women who were five, seven, and even nine months pregnant held down on the operating table and aborted. Women continue to be arrested, aborted, and sterilized against their will at this very moment.”
The claim that China has ended its cruel and inhuman practice of forced abortions originates with All Girls Allowed (AGA), which reached this conclusion after learning that a Chinese government “document [was issued]to Family Planning offices that bans forced abortion and sterilization.”
“I do not doubt that such a document was issued,” maintains Mosher. “Indeed, I expected that the Chinese government would engage in exactly this kind of damage control. After all, the recent spate of adverse publicity generated by blind activist Chen Guangcheng’s flight into exile, and Feng Jianmei’s brutal forced abortion at seven months gestation, has made hundreds of millions of people around the world and inside of China aware of its crimes against humanity. The Chinese Party-State, which is responsible for such criminal acts, has lost face, and is now trying recover.”
“Coercion will continue,” Mosher went on. “How will officials successfully extort huge fines from women and their families for violating the one-child policy if they can’t threaten women with forced abortion and sterilization for not paying up?
This latest document will no more end forced abortion than did the 2002 Population and Family Planning Law of the People’s Republic of China, Article 4 of which directed population control officials to “enforce the law in a civil manner, and [they may]not infringe upon legitimate rights and interests of citizens.”
Forced abortions and other abuses won’t end,” notes Mosher, “until the Chinese Party-State not only abandons the one-child policy, but abandons its Maoist-Marxist belief that it has the right to control the reproduction of human beings under a state plan.
