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China’s One-Child Policy Examined by House Committee

On September 22, the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, and Human Rights held a hearing, “China’s One-Child Policy: The Government’s Massive Crime Against Women and Unborn Babies.”

Reggie Littlejohn, founder and president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers (WRWF), discussed the organization’s report, which details incidents of forced sterilization, infanticide, and abortion. She said, “In this report are thirteen new, documented cases of coercion: forced abortion (including one woman at eight months and another carrying twins at 8½ months), forced sterilization, forced contraception, the use of abortion and sterilization quotas, family planning police, family planning jail cells, the demolition of homes (even by relatives, for missing a pregnancy check), [and] the use of ‘implication’ (detention, torture, and fining of relatives of ‘violators’). The report contains accounts of a couple brutally tortured for missing a pregnancy check by one day; a man whose head was smashed open and who is now permanently disabled because his wife had a second child; a father who was beaten to death because his son was suspected of having a second child.” Citing another effect of the policy, Ms. Littlejohn added, “Because of abortion, abandonment, and infanticide of baby girls, there are an estimated 37 million Chinese men who will never marry because they cannot find wives. This gender imbalance is a powerful, driving force behind trafficking in women and sexual slavery from nations surrounding China. According to the 2011 [State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons] Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report, China is on the Tier 2 Watch List: a source, destination and transit country for trafficked people. ‘Women and children from neighboring countries including Burma, Vietnam, Laos, Mongolia, Russia, and North Korea, and from locations as far as Romania and Zimbabwe are reportedly trafficked to China for commercial sexual exploitation and forced labor.’”

Valerie Hudson, professor of political science at Brigham Young University, explained the national security implications for countries that have imbalanced birth gender ratios: “For every daughter culled from the population, a son will become ‘surplus’ – or in colloquial Chinese, a ‘bare branch’ on the family tree. Our estimates are that by the year 2020, young adult bare branches (ages 15-34) will number approximately 23-25 million in China alone, which constitutes 13 percent of this young adult male population…It is important to understand which young men become the bare branches who will have little chance of marrying and establishing a family. Well-off young men with education, skills, money, looks, or some combination thereof, will marry. It is the young men without advantages – those who are poor, unskilled, illiterate – who will find themselves without the ability to form families. The men at these lower socio-economic levels already feel disenfranchised from established society; their inability to form a family deepens their aggrievement with the existing social order…The foremost repercussions will be an increase in societal instability, marked by increases in crime, violent crime, crimes against women, vice, substance abuse, and the formation of gangs involved in all of these antisocial behaviors. Unattached young adult males are several times more likely to engage in these types of behaviors than attached young adult males. Furthermore, unattached young adult males tend to congregate, and when they do, their behavior as a group is more antisocial than the behavior of each individual would be by himself. These empirical findings hold cross-nationally: young adult males, especially unattached young adult males, monopolize violence in every human society.”

“My husband and I decided then that we would wait to have a second child until after our daughter was old enough to attend kindergarten,” said Ji Yeqing, a Chinese woman who was forced to terminate her pregnancy under China’s one-child policy. “In June 2003, I discovered that I was pregnant again after a checkup at the only gynecological clinic nearby, the Jiading District Women and Children’s Clinic. Both my husband and I were very happy. However, the clinic was in close cooperation with the Family Planning Commission of Xiaomiao Village…and reported my pregnancy. The day after my checkup at the clinic, Li Chunping of the Family Planning Commission and three other agents came to our home and told me that, according to the One-Child Policy, we could not have a second child. I was pregnant again and had no choice but to undergo an abortion. Otherwise, we would be sabotaging the Family Planning Policy and breaking the law. Not only would we be fined 200,000 yuan ($31,300), which was more than three times our combined annual income, but also we would be fired from our jobs. We were very afraid at the time about losing our jobs. We could never acquire enough money to pay the exorbitant fines. Li then brought me to the same clinic to force an abortion. After the operation, they made me promise that I would have the IUD put in. Only then did they release me. But I never did get the IUD implanted because I was still very hesitant about the IUD procedure. I had heard it was very painful and could produce serious physical complications. So I continued taking contraceptive pills. My in-laws insisted that we try for another pregnancy. They also promised to give us money to pay for the fines. They wanted a grandson even if it cost 200,000 yuan. My husband persuaded me to stop taking the pills in February 2006. I was pregnant again in September of the same year…Two days after my visit to the hospital, Li Chunping and five other agents came to our home to ask why I had not had the IUD inserted and why I had decided to get pregnant again. I told them that I wanted another child and we were prepared to pay the fines…They dragged me down from the fourth floor into a waiting car, drove into the Jiading Women and Children’s Clinic, and pulled me directly into the operating room. They held me down in a bed and sedated me. The abortion was performed while I was unconscious. When I came to, I was already in the recovery room outside the operating room. Doctors told me that they had installed the IUD immediately after the abortion, and that I was responsible for the cost of the IUD procedure.”

Chai Ling, founder of All Girls Allowed, and Liu Ping, a victim of forced abortion, also testified.