It is no secret that the government of China operates the most active abortion machine on the globe. Under its 30-year-old official “one-child” policy for Chinese families (a policy that has supposedly been “softened” in recent years to allow for two children in some cases), China is responsible for the slaughter of an estimated 13 million pre-born babies every year, with the average Chinese woman undergoing between three and four compulsory abortions each.
But Tom Strode of the Baptist Press recently reported that the Chinese government’s powerful pro-abortion message is beginning to be challenged by the one group that has the spiritual upper hand: the country’s underground church.
Strode wrote that an unnamed pro-life leader from the United States recently met with more than 100 pastors from unregistered (i.e., illegal) churches in the country, training them in “what the Bible teaches about the sanctity of human life, forgiveness in Christ for those who have aborted their children and the call to rescue those threatened by abortion.” The leader called the response from the pastors “quite stunning,” telling Strode that the church leaders received the training “with great lamentation and conviction and tears,” and began to discuss how they could launch such pro-life efforts as a “pregnancy help movement” in China.
In the latest effort to crack down on illegal church activity in its country, where less than 100 million individuals confess faith in Christ (in a country claiming an estimated 1.34 billion souls), the Chinese communist government recently launched a four-month campaign known as “Operation Deterrence” to crack down on the burgeoning network of underground congregations that competes with the government’s carefully supervised “official church” operating under the auspices of one of two groups: the China Christian Council (that includes the Three-Self Patriotic Movement) overseeing Protestant congregations, and the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association administrating official Catholic congregations in China.
But in light of the historically demonstrated maxim that the Christian Church is most fruitful when suffering against efforts to destroy it, the Chinese government’s campaign is doomed to dismal failure. And nowhere is that truth becoming more apparent than in the increasing number of Chinese individuals boldly standing up for the sanctity of life.
Strode reported that among the most visible pro-life efforts have been:
— a 28-year-old woman who suffered through five abortions before publishing a booklet and launching an Internet discussion group to expose the anti-life philosophy of the Chinese government. According to China’s Global Times newspaper, the book circulated among an estimated 3,000 individuals in only three months.
— A 29-year-old former soldier who produced a DVD attacking his country’s abortion policy, selling 230 copies online in one month.
— A 27-year-old interior designer who started China’s first pro-life website, which the Global Times said attracts 50 hits a day (not bad in a country where the Internet is heavily monitored).
— A 45-year-old former software engineer who launched his own pro-life website, called “Save Baby,” and has personally distributed more than 20,000 pro-life fliers to universities and a local hospital.
While it is not certain that each of these individuals is a believing Christian, all are certainly doing their part to fulfill the overtly Christian function of defending life and declaring the truth that will help to set their fellow citizens free (John 8:32).
The message that all life is sacred is not one that is readily received in a nation whose people have been conditioned for decades to believe that a pre-born child is not human, and that the state has the final say concerning who may or may not bear and raise children.
In September of this year, China observed the 30th anniversary of its official one-child policy, during which Li Bin, the communist bureaucrat overseeing China’s National Population and Family Planning Commission, expressed “profound gratitude to all … for their support of the national course” of China’s abortion policy, and confirmed that her country would “stick to the family-planning policy in the coming decades.”
On that sad anniversary, U.S. Representative Chris Smith (R-N.J.), one of the leading pro-life voices in Congress, called China’s official policy “a human rights violation that is, in scope and seriousness, the worst human rights abuse in the world today.”
He described how women are required to apply for birth permits before they can legally become pregnant, and how children of single mothers are routinely aborted. “The brave pregnant woman who refuses to give in is usually detained and beaten,” Smith explained, “or, if she goes into hiding, her relatives are detained and beaten. Families that succeed in hiding an ‘out-of-plan’ pregnancy are punished with fines up to ten times the average annual income.”
This is the policy that American media mogul and liberal activist gadfly Ted Turner touts as a model for global population control. Likewise, it ought to provide the motivation for countless Christians in the United States to stand more boldly for the unborn, and to pray for their brothers and sisters in China (and elsewhere) who are speaking out for the sanctity of life at far greater risk.
