News Alert

Washington Post, 11/11/09 [Excerpts]: Coerced abortions, as well as involuntary sterilizations, are commonplace in China. While the Chinese Communist Party insists that abortions are voluntary under the nation's one-child policy, electronic documentation recently smuggled out of the country tells a different story.

Congressional members of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission heard some of that story Tuesday, two days before President Obama was slated to leave for Asia, including China, to discuss economic issues. Among evidence provided by two human rights organizations, ChinaAid and Women's Rights Without Frontiers, were tales of pregnant women...being hunted down and forced to submit to surgery or induced labor. Reggie Littlejohn, founder and president of the Frontiers group, told the commission that China's one-child policy "causes more violence against women and girls than any other official policy on Earth." Littlejohn asks: What really happens to a woman who doesn't have a "birth permit" and has an "out of plan" pregnancy? [She must] surrender her unborn child to government enforcers, no matter what the stage of fetal development.

On one Web site for Chinese obstetricians and gynecologists, doctors recently traded tips in a dispassionate discussion titled: "What if the infant is still alive after induced labor?" "Damohuyang" wrote that most late-term infants died during induced labor, some lived and "would be left in trash cans."

As recently as July, officials of China's National Population and Family Planning Commission said that the one-child policy "will be strictly enforced as a means of controlling births for decades to come," according to Xinhua, the state-run news agency. The violence of these procedures doesn't only kill the child....In two of the cases described...the mothers died, too. Those who dissent are persecuted....About 500 women a day commit suicide in China -the highest rate in the world, which Littlejohn attributes in part to coercive family planning.