The One-Child Policy Is Still Violently Enforced
by Anne Roback Morse
Population Research Institute
On April 30th, Congressman Chris Smith chaired a hearing on population control in China in the U.S. Capitol. The hearing covered appalling human rights abuses—police brutality, illegal detention, torture, forced abortion, and coerced sterilization—under China’s population control program. Sadly, only a handful of journalists covered this important hearing.
Maybe this lack of coverage is because China is on the other side of the world. Or maybe the hearing was ignored because when people hear “family planning” they think about clinics with shiny pink brochures about Pap smears. Whatever the reason, much of the world regards the ongoing abuses of China’s one-child policy with—as Congressman Chris Smith noted last week—“breathtaking indifference.”
The expert witnesses laid out a case that China’s one-child policy is a demographic nightmare, and that the Communist Party only continues this policy to dominate the social and personal life of its citizens.
Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt, a demographer at the American Enterprise Institute, testified to the catastrophically skewed sex ratios created by the one-child policy. Eberstadt stated “about 25% of Chinese men in late thirties, and over 20% of those in their early forties, would be never-married by the year 2030.”
Following Dr. Eberstadt, Dr. Hudson testified on public policies necessary to end sex-selective abortions. Based on a comparative study between China’s neighbors, South Korea and Vietnam, she concluded that to end sex-selective abortions, “Coercive fertility limitation policies should be removed.”
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