A recent story in an unlikely place, the Washington Post, highlights a number of problems with the pro-abortion movement worldwide. The most blatant of course is how most advocates for abortion ignore places like China where U.S. taxpayers are subsidizing forced abortions and sterilizations. Even when stories come out of how this policy is mostly affecting the poor in China who cannot afford the steep fines (7.49 million yuan (HK$ 9.59 million) in one case for simply having three children, two over the China legal limit).
See what else you can find in these excerpts of the Post article:
BEIJING — When her mind is clear, Gong Qifeng can recall how she begged for mercy. Several people pinned her head, arms, knees and ankles to a hospital bed before driving a syringe of labor-inducing drugs into her stomach.
She was seven months pregnant with what would have been her second boy. The drugs caused her to have a stillborn baby after 35 hours of excruciating pain. She was forced to have the abortion by officials in China’s southern province of Hunan in the name of complying with national limits on family size.
“It was the pain of my lifetime, worse than the pain of delivering a child. You cannot describe it,” Gong, 25, said in a recent interview in Beijing. “And it has become a mental pain. I feel like a walking corpse.”
Since the abortion more than two years ago, Gong has been diagnosed with schizophrenia. She traveled with her husband to the capital to demand help paying for her treatment, but she ended up being hauled away in her pajamas by police, a detention recorded on video by The Associated Press.
Forced abortions are considered an acceptable way of enforcing China’s population limits, but they are banned when the woman is more than five months pregnant. Yet no one has been held accountable for Gong’s late-term abortion, and other women in similar cases also struggle to get justice and compensation. . . .
Although China in November announced an easing of its “one-child” policy to allow more couples to have a second child, the overall system remains in place and local governments are still required to keep to population quotas. The new policy would not have applied to Gong because it allows couples to have a second child only if both the mother and father have no siblings.
“The system has not changed at all,” said Liang Zhongtang, a demographer at Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. “It still forbids you from having more children than permitted by the government, so the game — and forced later-term abortions — are unavoidable if you want to have children the government does not allow.” . . .
Wu said his wife was different after the abortion. She easily burst into tears, picked fights with him, punched at him and their son and refused contact with others. In May 2013, about 18 months after the abortion, a doctor diagnosed her with schizophrenia, he said.
The majority of the article shows the tremendous, and at times arbitrary, results of China’s “birth control” policy – though nowhere in the article does it go into the U.S. involvement or that china in some ways is merely fulfilling Margaret Sanger, the “mother” of legal abortion in the United States, dream.
Two other points of interest stand out from the above excerpts though. One is the obvious psychological damage Gong Qifeng’s abortion had on her. While some of that might be dismissed by the violence surrounding her abortion, numerous studies have found that women even under “optimal” surroundings suffer psychological trauma and/or aftereffects following an abortion, for, in truth, every abortion is violent.
Secondly China, a near abortion utopia, actually bans late term abortions. Here in the United States we are just starting the legislative debate if such human life should be protected – in fact we are one of the most liberal countries when it comes to killing the unborn. The U.S. is one of only four nations permitting abortion for any reason after viability. In fact most nations prohibit abortion after 14 weeks of gestation. However, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Canada do not.
So I stand corrected it is not only China that is a “near abortion utopia” – the United States is on the precipice of being one, despite having a pro-life majority among its populace. It is long overdue that our legislative and government policies, and the politicians who write and enforce those policies, stand up for the human dignity of all human beings, regardless of age. It is not only the will of the people but the right thing to do.
some see initial signs of hope.