China's Shame: Forced Abortion and 'Gendercide'

by Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women's Rights Without Frontiers

I would like to dispel the major misconceptions that have arisen since China shifted from a "one-child" to a "two-child" policy at the beginning of 2016. We must remember the millions of women, children and families whose lives have been destroyed and continue to be destroyed by coercive population control in China.

The Chinese Communist Party has boasted that it has "prevented" over 400 million lives. In March 2013, it revealed it has conducted more than half a billion birth control procedures, including 336 million abortions and 196 million sterilizations.

One statistic the CCP never discloses is how many of these abortions were forced. Of these 336 million abortions, how many women were dragged out of their homes, strapped to tables and forced to abort babies that they wanted, up to the ninth month of pregnancy? How many women died as a result of these violent procedures? And of these 336 million abortions, how many were selectively aborted because they were girls?

Another statistic the CCP never discloses is how many of the 196 million sterilizations were forced? In April of 2010, in Puning City, Guangdong Province, family-planning officials set out to sterilize 9,559 people. Those who refused were detained, along with their family members. Forced sterilization is a crime against humanity.

Such large statistics boggle the mind and mask the hundreds of millions of individual broken lives caused by this brutal policy. Forced abortion and involuntary sterilization are violence against women. Women's Rights Without Frontiers calls upon President Xi Jinping to end this state-sponsored crime against humanity. China will not be free until the women of China are free.

According to the 2015 U.S. State Department's China Human Rights Country Report, released in 2016, the estimated number of abortions in China has increased from 13 to 23 million a year. In the past, the Chinese government reported 13 million abortions a year. However, the State Department report states that an "official [Chinese] news media outlet" has reported that "at least an additional 10 million chemically-induced abortions were performed in non-governmental facilities". Adding abortions at official and unofficial facilities results in 23 million abortions a year.

End of China's one-child policy?
2016 began with the deceptive announcement by the Chinese Communist Party that it had "abandoned" or "scrapped" the one-child policy. This language is misleading, as it gives the impression that forced abortion and coercive population control have ended in China. Nothing could be further from the truth. To the contrary, both forced abortion of unmarried women and of third children continues. Further, the sex-selective abortion of baby girls continues.

For example, a couple, surnamed Zhong, in August of 2017 were forced to choose between an abortion at eight months or the loss of both of their government jobs. In a separate incident, He Liping was forced either to pay an impossible "terror fine" of $39,000 or face abortion at six months.

A BBC article entitled "Reinventing China's abortion police" (May 4, 2016) discusses a small collaborative project by Stanford University and Shaanxi Normal University to repurpose 69 family-planning officials, apparently on the assumption that they are no longer needed now that China has moved to a twochild policy. In this report, a Chinese Communist Party official unwittingly admits that coercive population control continues in China.

The article follows one family-planning official, Li Bo, who has been "reinvented" from "hunt[ing] down families suspected of violating the country's draconian rules on how many children couples can have" into a rubber duckie squeezing, nursery rhyme singing "Chinese Father Christmas", complete with "a bag full of toys and picture books".

Has his job really been "reinvented", or is he really a member of the "womb police", masquerading as "Chinese Father Christmas" - the new face of China's family-planning police? Buried deep in the article is the following account of the dark side of Li Bo's job - an important piece of original reporting by the BBC:

"Since the start of 2016, all Chinese couples have been allowed two children. But they can have no more than that unless they are from ethnic minorities - so Li Bo still spends some of his time working as a birth-control enforcer. In the town's health clinic he is busy screening local women. All women of childbearing age have check-ups four times a year to ensure they're healthy... and to see if they are pregnant...

"But Li is also a loyal Communist party official who believes the state knows best and society's needs are greater than those of individuals. So he is matter-of-fact about the unpleasant task of telling women who couldn't afford the fine to terminate their pregnancies. 'People didn't swear at us but they probably did behind our backs,' he says. 'It's natural because we were carrying out the law and they were breaking it so it is just like the clash between a policeman and a thief.' He adds that as long as restrictions are in place, such clashes will continue."

In a triumph of investigative journalism, on October 28, 2016, the BBC has released a report, "China's forbidden babies still an issue", confirming that under the two-child policy, forced abortion remains a threat for women pregnant with a third child. In this report, John Sudworth, the BBC's Beijing correspondent, interviews the father of a family in hiding because his wife has just given birth to their third child. The report describes the man as "anxious and on edge, but still determined to tell his story". He told the BBC, "A third baby is not allowed, so we are renting a home away from our village. The local government carries out pregnancy examinations every three months. If we weren't in hiding, they would have forced us to have an abortion." (Emphasis added.)

The family was able to escape forced abortion by going into hiding; but when they come out, they will face a fine that could be as large as 10 times their annual salary. "We don't have the money for the fine. We just don't know what to do," the father told the BBC. He does not, however, regret his decision. "When I look at our new baby, I feel happy."

Sudworth aimed to discover what the policy shift from one to two children per couple means in practice. "And what we have discovered," he concludes, "suggests that the brutal machinery of enforcement is still in place along with the Chinese state's insistence on the right of control over women's wombs."

This powerful report confirms what I have been saying all along: the new two-child policy will not end forced abortion. As blind activist Chen Guangcheng succinctly tweeted: "This [new two-child policy] is nothing to be happy about. First the CCP would kill any baby after one. Now they will kill any baby after two." Under the two-child policy, a woman's body remains in the domain of the state. The entire infrastructure of coercion remains in force, with forced pregnancy examinations every three to six months.

Sudworth also visited the local family-planning centre, where he asked a senior official whether forced abortions had been carried out in the operating rooms there. The official replied, "Very few", and then added, none for "at least 10 years". Sudworth reflected, "Where else in the world would you find a government official admitting that his colleagues have kidnapped, drugged and forcibly operated on women, no matter how long ago? Where else would the qualifier 'very few' be considered an acceptable alternative to an outright denial?"

A colleague of Sudworth's then called several family-planning centres and spoke to officials at random. She pretended to be pregnant with her third child and asked how she might keep it. All the officials stated that she would have to pay a heavy fine.

Beyond this, some of the officials went further, "engaging in coercive home visits with the aim of 'persuading' women to have abortions", according to the BBC report. One official told Sudworth's colleague, "If you're reported to us, then we'll find you and we'll persuade you not to give birth to that baby." Another official said, "We'll definitely find you and persuade you to do an abortion." When asked if a woman could have a third child and then pay the fine, a third official stated, "No. You just can't."

The official's statement, "If you're reported to us...", indicates that this Orwellian system of informants remains under the twochild policy. "Illegally pregnant" women have been reported to family-planning police by their neighbours, co-workers, supervisors and people in their villages who are paid just to watch women to see if anyone looks pregnant.

The statement by the officials, "We'll definitely find you and persuade you to do an abortion", indicates that the Chinese government continues to conduct search-and-destroy missions, searching for "illegally pregnant" women in order to destroy their desperately wanted babies. This happened to Feng Jianmei and Wujian, both of whom were dragged out of hiding and forced to undergo abortions.

I applaud the brilliant investigative journalism of John Sudworth and his colleague, and the courage of the BBC to publish his report. It is extremely difficult to find people willing to speak to the Western media about the continuation of forced abortion in China, because of harsh retaliation by the Chinese government against them personally and their families. The story of this courageous couple in hiding deserves to be told the world over.

Sex-selective abortions continue
Meanwhile, 'gendercide' continues. In the countryside, it has long been the case that where the first child is a girl, a couple may have a second child. Many couples have regarded this as their last chance to have a boy, and have selectively aborted or abandoned their second daughters. Sex-selective abortions have overwhelmingly been late-term, because a woman has to be five to six months pregnant to determine the gender by ultrasound. In addition, many women resist having these ultrasounds until very late in the pregnancy, because they resist being pressured, usually by their in-laws, into aborting their daughters.

Now, according to an article from a Chinese news service published in January 2017, married couples are circumventing mainland Chinese law against sex-determination tests for unborn children by employing genetic testing firms in Hong Kong.

The article features the story of a young woman who sent a sample of her blood to a Hong Kong-based testing firm. The day after receiving the report showing she was most likely pregnant with a girl child, she had an abortion.

We predicted last year that the increasing availability of non-invasive pregnancy tests (NIPTs) and the modified two-child policy would result in an increase, not a decrease, in sex-selective abortion. Second daughters remain endangered. The combination of son-preference with the Chinese government's coercive low birth limit has created a culture that oppresses females. The ripple effects of these biases and destructive policies are seen both in the highly skewed birth ratio between male and female babies, and the widespread practice of sex-trafficking of women and girls as prostitutes or forced brides.

It makes absolutely no demographic or economic sense for the Chinese government to continue to impose birth limitations of any sort whatsoever. China's population problem is not that it has too many people. It's that it has too few young people and too few women.

Forced abortion is not a choice. It is official government rape. We need to keep the international pressure on the Chinese Communist Party until all coercive population control is eradicated. Modifying the one-child policy into a two-child policy has not ended forced abortion, forced sterilization or gendercide. Coercive population control in China does not need to be modified. It needs to be abolished.

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