Every evening, the television networks report with dramatic visuals about happenings thousands of miles away from home. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that these events, photographed in living color and brought into our homes by the miracle of modern technology, are highly selective.
We’ve probably seen a hundred minutes of South Africa for every one minute of Afghanistan. We hear about violations of human rights under anti-Communist regimes, but somehow we don’t hear much about what is probably the most grievous violation of human rights taking place today — the forced abortions in Communist China.
An eye-witness report about this is now being related in speeches across the country by Steven Mosher, a professional anthropologist and author who spent several years in rural China. He went to Mainland China after President Jimmy Carter recognized Red China in 1979 and opened up cultural exchanges.
Mosher found, to his great surprise, that conditions for the Chinese peasants are worse today than they were in 1951. They are not even eating as well as in pre-Mao days. While Mosher was there, the government issued a directive that population growth cannot exceed one percent. In compliance, pregnant women were rounded up, taken miles away from their homes, locked up, and put through all-day “re-education” sessions until they agreed to have an abortion.
This included women who were six, seven, eight, and nine months pregnant. The women were told that their infants would be killed if they gave birth in defiance of the quota. Some of the babies were taken in labor and killed on the spot.
In 1981, the state imposed a quota on births for every village. All local officials must sign contracts that they will work to meet the birth-limitation quota. If they fail, they are fined; if they succeed, they get bonuses. The village Mosher was in was assigned a quota of seven births that year.
In China, the minimum marriage age is 25. After marriage, you can apply for a conception certificate. If you get pregnant without this certificate, you are given “re-education” meetings until you agree to an abortion.
In 1983, the population control commission issued directive #7. It required that all women who have had one child be fitted with an IUD, that all women who have had two children be sterilized, and that all women with an over-quota pregnancy have a mandatory abortion.
Women going into delivery must prove that the birth is legal. If not, the baby is given an injection of formaldehyde or strangled or its skull is crushed at birth.
In one province near Hong Kong, the local official ordered a house-to-house search. All pregnant-over-quota women were arrested, bound or handcuffed, dragged kicking and screaming, some of them toted in pig baskets, and taken miles away from their homes. This one local reign of terror resulted in 19,000 forced abortions in three months.
The ruling authorities have adopted a modus operandi that makes it acceptable to arrest, imprison, threaten, and brainwash the pregnant women until they are terrified into walking the last two steps toward the knife on their own. This enables Peking to propagate the fiction that abortions are “voluntary.”
This policy has resulted in a phenomenon called “childbirth on the run.” Desperate women hide their pregnancy for six months, then hit the road, traveling from village to village, hoping they can have their baby without being noticed. That isn’t easy; the officials make periodic house-to-house roundups.
Mosher estimates that Red China has performed 115 million abortions since 1971, 90 percent of which were not voluntary. Since 1979, there have been 53 million abortions, more than half after the fifth month because the mother was hoping to hide her pregnancy.
On top of the abortions is the problem of infanticide of girl babies carried out by their own parents. In rural China where 85 percent of the Chinese live, sons are the only retirement program people have. The quota of one child per couple has resulted in a bucket of water often kept by the bed to drown the baby at birth if it is a girl.
In 1981, China reported 235,000 fewer girl babies born than boy babies; in 1982, 300,000 fewer girls; in 1983, 345,000 fewer girls. In 1984, the government stopped releasing the statistics.
