Lisa's Parents with Their Four Daughters in China
By Lisa Smiley
Only weeks ago, the Chinese Communist Party announced that China will be changing its long-standing one-child policy to a two-child policy.
While this is welcome news, the nation’s violent, coercive family planning regime will only be altered moderately by this change. Even ending the policy entirely cannot bring back lives already lost.
For almost four decades, the oppressive regime has strictly implemented forced sterilization and forced abortions on millions of women who were caught having more than one child.
China’s official health ministry estimates that over 330 million children have been aborted since the policy was instituted in 1980. Often, women found pregnant with more than one child are dragged out of their homes, beaten and forced to undergo abortion by the government’s family planning enforcement.
This news is personal to me. I come from a Chinese family of five girls and one boy. All the girls were born in communist China; the youngest three, including myself, were born illegally after the one-child policy went into effect.
There were certain times in the year when government officials were especially strict on families who broke the law. During those times, my two older sisters were left at home in the care of my aunts and uncles, while my parents would have to take the younger daughters to another part of the province and stay with my grandparents.
We were never allowed to all be at home when the officials came looking for us. The whole village was very hush hush; daring families like ours who had more than one or two children ran off with their babies for fear of what the government would do to us.
My oldest sister, who was attending elementary school, remembers this time. Government workers would come up to her and ask where her parents were. She would answer that she didn’t know. My parents never told her much of what was going on, so she didn’t have any secrets to share.
She also remembers how other kids and families would look down upon us and talk behind our backs about our large family of girls. We were not just illegal; we were also socially unaccepted. She heard people condemning our family, saying, What bad luck to have so many girls! That family will surely have no future.
While this is welcome news, the nation’s violent, coercive family planning regime will only be altered moderately by this change. Even ending the policy entirely cannot bring back lives already lost.
For almost four decades, the oppressive regime has strictly implemented forced sterilization and forced abortions on millions of women who were caught having more than one child.
China’s official health ministry estimates that over 330 million children have been aborted since the policy was instituted in 1980. Often, women found pregnant with more than one child are dragged out of their homes, beaten and forced to undergo abortion by the government’s family planning enforcement.
This news is personal to me. I come from a Chinese family of five girls and one boy. All the girls were born in communist China; the youngest three, including myself, were born illegally after the one-child policy went into effect.
There were certain times in the year when government officials were especially strict on families who broke the law. During those times, my two older sisters were left at home in the care of my aunts and uncles, while my parents would have to take the younger daughters to another part of the province and stay with my grandparents.
We were never allowed to all be at home when the officials came looking for us. The whole village was very hush hush; daring families like ours who had more than one or two children ran off with their babies for fear of what the government would do to us.
My oldest sister, who was attending elementary school, remembers this time. Government workers would come up to her and ask where her parents were. She would answer that she didn’t know. My parents never told her much of what was going on, so she didn’t have any secrets to share.
She also remembers how other kids and families would look down upon us and talk behind our backs about our large family of girls. We were not just illegal; we were also socially unaccepted. She heard people condemning our family, saying, What bad luck to have so many girls! That family will surely have no future.
Lisa's story continues: http://www.lifenews.com/2015/12/10/
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