“It’s a girl.”
These are three of the deadliest words in the world, according to the speakers at the Heritage Foundation’s recent panel discussion entitled “China’s One Child Policy: A Discussion on Valuing Women and Girls in the 21st Century.” The day coincided with the International Day of the Girl Child.
Keynote speaker Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) called China’s one-child policy “state-sponsored violence against women and children” and a crime against humanity. The 34-year-old policy limits the number of children a woman may bear and bans single mothers from obtaining permission to bear a child. Without a birth permit, children are denied access to education and marriage later in life.
Because of the policy, “A mother has no right to protect herself or her child from this violence,” he said.
Smith harshly condemned the Obama administration — particularly Joe Biden for his three-year-old comment that he “understands” and is “not second-guessing” the policy — for failing to pressure the Chinese government to abandon the abusive restriction. He also criticized senators for being unwilling to address the issue out of fear that doing so would compromise other foreign policy goals. Such a hesitance comes at a high humanitarian cost, Smith said.
Chen Guangcheng, a Chinese civil rights lawyer who has been jailed for his opposition to the One Child policy, can speak to the policy’s human cost.
“After decades of this policy, the Chinese live in an atmosphere of fear of their government,” he explained. “Chinese people know that they must obey the policy or suffer very much for violating those sorts of rules.”
Guangcheng told the story of a couple from his village who refused a government-mandated abortion and were taken away by government officials on a truck. On the way to the clinic, the husband was taken off of the truck and beaten on the ground, before he was put back on the truck and the couple was brought to the clinic for the abortion. The two were then returned home with no one to care for them after suffering the beating and the forced abortion.
And this is just one of those tens of thousands of examples of those who suffer this sort of treatment in China, he stressed.
“Rather than your home being your castle, in China the government reaches into your body and takes your baby and kills it in front of you,” he concluded.
Reggie Littlejohn, the founder and President of Women’s Rights without Frontiers, echoed this sentiment when she said that the communist government of China boasted that it had prevented the birth of some 400 million children, the majority of them girls.
“This is the hallmark of communist regimes — the peacetime killing of their own citizens,” she said.
She stressed that pro-choice and pro-life activists need to band together to support the rights of women in China, because forced abortion was not a choice at all.
“It is a woman’s right to choose to give birth to her children, including her daughters.”
Noting that there was a strong correlation between sex-selective abortions and coercion, she said that women were culturally pressured into aborting their daughters. This “gendercide” drives human trafficking and sexual slavery and “causes more violence against women and girls than any other policy on earth and any other policy in the history of the world.”
“The three deadliest words in the world: ‘It’s a girl,’ ” said Littlejohn.
Her sentiment was shared by the other speakers, who made it clear that the One Child policy was not just the internal affair of a foreign country, but an ongoing human rights violation on a massive scale demanding an appropriate response from the American government.
Only then can forced abortion and gendercide be, in Littlejohn’s words, “[swept]… into the dung heap of history.”
