China’s Brutal Coerced Abortion Policies

The article is entitled “How China Has Pruned Its Families’ Trees” and it appeared in Time magazine earlier this month. For years, we have been reporting on China’s one-child-per-family policy which has lead to forced abortion and sterilization and other coercive policies. This spring, I reported the firsthand account of a guide we hired when visiting Shanghai. Alice matter-of-factly told us her husband is a teacher, they depend on his income, they have one child, and that were they to have another, her husband would lose his job.

Now, Hannah Beech discusses the impact of the thirty-year-old Chinese policy of “pruning family trees of cousins.” Beech describes how China has achieved economic success and “spared the planet 400 million people.” Beech writes: “Even as foreigners decry the forced sterilizations and other abuses committed by zealous family-planning officials, an uneasy thought emerges: maybe China’s rulers had it right all along.”

The article lists unwanted stark results from the program:

• A fertility rate of 1.6, far below replacement level of 2.1.
• A huge gender imbalance with a far greater number of men than women as baby girls are aborted. “The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences estimates that by 2020 there will be at least 24 million ‘bare branches’ — men destined to stay single because there are not enough wives to go around. As more of those boys become bachelors, China risks all sorts of social plagues — from criminal gangs to greater trafficking in women,” the article states.
• The danger of too many more older people than the young can take care of.

Booming economically? Maybe. But does that growth justify the human rights abuses which occur daily in China? We think not. What do you think?

Read the entire article here.

Barbara Lyons