The Chinese Communist Party denies that it forces women to abort wanted pregnancies or to be sterilized. This is propaganda. The breaking story—Population and Family Planning Bureau has detained 1,300 people in a campaign to sterilize nearly 10,000 people in the city of Puning, Guangdong Province—proves it.
A courageous investigative report by the Nanfang Countryside Daily gives us a rare glimpse into the brutal inner workings of China’s One-Child Policy. The Puning population control authorities have detained parents—as well as other family members, such as elderly grandparents—for refusing the sterilization procedures.
The twenty-day campaign, launched April 7, is well along in achieving its goal of 9,559 sterilizations. “A doctor in Daba village said that his team was working flat out, beginning sterilizations every day at 8 a.m. and working straight through until 4 a.m. the following day.”
Violators of the [one child] policy are routinely punished with fines, and in some cases, subjected to forced sterilization, forced abortion, arbitrary detention, and torture.
What’s the hurry? Officials in Puning may fail in their bid for promotion to a second-tier county “if they cannot meet all quotas,” according to The London Times.
Sterilization quotas? Perhaps this is the reason that Puning authorities are sterilizing people like 64-year-old Huang Ruifeng, as reported by The Telegraph.
Unfortunately, the Puning sterilization campaign is not an isolated incident. According to the 2009 Report of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, “Violators of the [one child] policy are routinely punished with fines, and in some cases, subjected to forced sterilization, forced abortion, arbitrary detention, and torture.”
The State Department 2009 Country Report on China states, “In the case of families that already had two children, one parent was often pressured to undergo sterilization.”
Not only does the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) forcibly sterilize women. It also forcibly aborts women who get pregnant without a government-issued “birth permit.” These abortions can occur up to the ninth month of pregnancy, and can be so violent that they sometimes result in the death of the women.
To see the evidence, read the documents submitted to the Congressional Record in November 2009:
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China has the highest female suicide rate in the world. According to the World Heath Organization, 500 women a day end their lives in China—a rate that is three times higher than that for males in the same country. Could this grim statistic be related to the emotional and physical trauma of forced abortion and forced sterilization?
The CCP’s coercive family planning practices are also linked to dangerously skewed birth ratios of more than 120 boys born for every 100 girls born. The traditional preference for boys, the harsh limit on the number of children allowed, and the availability of sex-selective abortion have led to a situation in which there are approximately 37 million more men than women in China today.
This “gendercide” is a major driving force behind human trafficking and sexual slavery, not only in China but in several surrounding countries as well.
China’s one-child policy causes more violence against women and girls than any other official policy on earth. It doesn’t matter whether you’re pro-choice or pro-life on this issue. No one should support forced abortion, because it’s not a choice.
In 2002, the International Criminal Court was established in The Hague. This Court’s definition of “crimes against humanity” includes torture, forced sterilization or any other form of sexual violence of similar gravity, when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack. These human rights atrocities must be “part either of a government policy … or of a wide practice of atrocities tolerated or condoned by a government.”
The CCP denies that it forcibly sterilizes people. If that’s true, then why isn’t the CCP stopping the forced sterilization campaign currently being carried out in Puning? The Party is certainly tolerating this campaign and set the population targets that have given rise to the sterilization quotas.
For these reasons, in my opinion, the forced abortions and sterilizations perpetrated in connection with enforcement of the One-Child Policy likely fall within the definition of a “crime against humanity.”
