China’s One Child Policy: Bounties on the Unborn

John on November 11, 2009 at 10:30 am

Kathleen Parker in today’s Washington Post:

Reggie Littlejohn, founder and president of the Frontiers group, told the commission that China’s one-child policy “causes more violence against women and girls than any other official policy on Earth.”

Here’s the question Littlejohn insists we consider: What really happens to a woman who doesn’t have a “birth permit” and has an “out of plan” pregnancy?

The answer is simple and brutal: A woman pregnant without permission has to surrender her unborn child to government enforcers, no matter what the stage of fetal development.

Late-term abortions are problematic, but the Chinese are nothing if not efficient. On one Web site for Chinese obstetricians and gynecologists, doctors recently traded tips in a dispassionate discussion titled: “What if the infant is still alive after induced labor?” ChinaAid provided a translation of a thread regarding an eight-month-old fetus that survived the procedure.

“Xuexia” wrote: “Actually, you should have punctured the fetus’ skull.” Another poster, “Damohuyang,” wrote that most late-term infants died during induced labor, some lived and “would be left in trash cans. Some of them could still live for one to two days.”

To be clear, some of the doctors online expressed concern for the rights of the child. Others, however, worried only about potential legal ramifications. Technically, it is illegal in China to kill a baby, one is relieved to learn, but family-planning imperatives sometimes prevail. According to a 2009 State Department report, monetary incentives and penalties are attached to population targets, creating what amounts to bounties on the unborn.

Kudos to Parker for shining some much needed light on this issue. However, I have one bone to pick. Here’s how the piece ends:

On this much, both sides of the abortion issue can agree: Forced abortion is not a choice. Averting our gaze from China’s horrific abuse of women is.

I don’t believe pro-choice people care about the kind of horrors described in Parker’s piece. Why would I say that? Because the description she relates of one Chinese abortionist telling another how to kill a newborn is describing partial birth abortion. Read it again. He says, in essence, stick scissors in the infant’s skull before it is all the way outside the mother. That way it’s technically abortion, not infanticide. That’s partial birth abortion. Pro-choice members of congress have defended this practice in the House and Senate.

You want me to believe pro-choice Americans care about the horrors inflicted in the name of China’s one-child policy? Sorry, I don’t because those horrors are no different than the ones that happen here at home in the name of “choice.”

Category: Pro-Life |