Despite reports earlier this year that China was poised to end its notorious family planning policies, the communist government appears to be continuing to force abortion on women who have more children than officially allowed.
According to National Public Radio (NPR) and the pro-life group Women’s Rights Without Frontiers (WRWF), the Chinese government recently coerced an ethnic Kazakh woman with two children living in Kazakhstan with her new husband to return to China, where she had previously lived, and then forcibly aborted her third child under China’s two-child policy.
As reported by WRWF, the woman, whose first husband died in China in 2015, married a Kazakh citizen living in Kazakhstan across the border in the summer of 2018. But she was informed by the Chinese government that she had to return with her two children to China in order to cancel her Chinese citizenship and become a citizen of Kazakhstan.
When she arrived back in China with her children, Chinese authorities discovered that she was pregnant and demanded that she terminate the pregnancy under China’s two-child policy — even though she assured them that the child she was carrying was conceived with her husband in Kazakhstan, making the unborn child a Kazakh citizen.
Realizing that the woman would not cave in to their demands, they took her and her brother, a Chinese citizen, to a government facility. There, the woman told NPR, “they made my brother sign a document saying that if I don’t get an abortion, he would suffer the consequences. I knew this meant he’d be detained in a camp.”
The woman explained that “I’d do anything to protect my brother, so I agreed to the abortion.” However, she related, two days after the abortion the Chinese officials sent her brother to an internment camp anyway.
WRWF, which has monitored China’s murderous “family planning” policies for years, noted that any suggestion that China is easing up and allowing families to decide how many children they want to have is completely false. “The fact that forced abortion continues under China’s two-child policy is further documented in the Population Control section of the 2018 Congressional Executive Commission on China (CECC) Report, which states that regulations ‘include provisions that require couples to be married to have children and limit them to bearing two children…. Officials reportedly continued to enforce compliance with family planning policies using methods including heavy fines, job termination, detention, and abortion.’”
In reality, explained WRWF on its website, while China’s Communist Party would like the world to believe that it has abandoned its one-child policy, which was instituted in 1979, “this is not true. The top population official in China recently announced that the Chinese Communist Party has no plans to change the One-Child Policy for at least another ten years.”
As for China’s so-called “two-child” policy, WRWF explained: “The Chinese Communist Party points out that they have created an exception — couples who are both only children can now have two children. Also, certain other exceptions have long existed. In the countryside, couples whose first child is a girl are often allowed to have a second child in the attempt to have a boy. Further, certain ethic minorities are allowed to have more than one child.”
Plus, of course, China’s tiny wealthy demographic “can circumvent the policy by moving to Hong Kong for the birth of their second child, or by paying exorbitant fines — which can range from one half to ten times their annual disposable income.”
Such alternatives, however, are not available for most of China’s population, “sixty percent of whom still live in the countryside, many in poverty,” pointed out WRWF. “It can also create resentment among those who cannot afford to buy their way out of the policy. In addition, penalties for non-compliance may include the detaining of family members and the destruction of property, including the demolition of homes.”
WRWF noted that “the problem with the one-child policy lies not in the number of children allowed. The problem lies with the coercive enforcement of the birth limit, whatever that limit might be. Whether a couple is allowed to have one child or two children, it is a human rights atrocity to drag a woman out of her home in the middle of the night, screaming and pleading, to forcibly abort her pregnancy, even in the ninth month — and under certain circumstances, to sterilize her — because she does not possess a government-issued birth permit.”
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