The Chinese Communist party announced that it is lifting its one-child policy, which led to the forced abortion of millions of children.
Not that the party is becoming pro-life: The policy led to a demographic mess, with an imbalance of more men than women (girls being most frequently aborted) and a shortage of new workers that threatens the nation’s economic growth. Nor is the party embracing any kind of freedom, in which couples can choose how many children they have. Now married couples will be allowed to have two children, but no more.
After the jump, excerpts and a link to a rather remarkable article in the usually pro-abortion Washington Post about the “horrors” of the one-child policy.
From Simon Denyer, Horrors of one-child policy leave deep scars in Chinese society – The Washington Post:
His wife was seven months pregnant with their second child when the group of people barged into his home and took her away. He followed them to the local hospital, where — against medical advice and despite his pleadings — they jammed a needle into her belly.
“They grabbed my wife’s body like they were grabbing a pig, four or five people holding her hands and legs and head, and injected a shot into her belly,” the man said, asking not to be named for fear of retribution. “Neither my wife nor I signed any consent form.”
Ten hours later, she gave birth to a boy, wriggling and faintly crying. But the doctors in southern Hunan province would not even let her hold the dying infant, the husband said. They put the baby in a plastic bag and instructed him to pay a cleaner a small sum to bury it on a nearby hill.
The incident happened not during the horrors of some Mao Zedong-inspired mania in the 1950s or 1960s but in 2011, in the Internet age and when China was walking proudly on the global stage as a major power.
On Thursday, China’s Communist Party announced it was abandoning its unpopular “one-child” policy after 35 years. But the scars still run deep.
In 2012, 6.7 million women in China were forced to have abortions under the one-child policy, according to official statistics. Rates in previous decades often topped 10 million a year. As a result, experts say, suicide rates among women in China are significantly higher than among men, in contrast to global norms.
Unimaginable numbers of girls are secretly aborted or killed in infancy every year by parents seeking boys, skewing the sex ratio dramatically.
In the past four decades, hundreds of millions of men and women have been forcibly sterilized or had intrauterine devices inserted, per Chinese family-planning policies.
The vast majority of people are still scared to speak out, but many, including some of the cadres involved in enforcing the policy, say they feel bitter to this day.
[Keep reading. . .]
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