By Steven W. Mosher
Population Research Institute
The woman on the operating table was nearly eight months pregnant. The doctor picked up a scalpel and made a transverse incision across her lower abdomen. Soon he was through the uterine wall, and removing a perfectly formed baby boy. The little boy was dead, of course, having been killed by lethal injection into the uterus the day before.
It was March 1980, and the Chinese Party-State had just gotten deadly serious about population control. The year before, Vice Premier Chen Muhua, the female head of China’s Family Planning Board, had let it be known that “Socialism should make it possible to regulate the reproduction of human beings.” Deng Xiaoping, China’s so-called Paramount Leader, had gone even further, ordering senior cadres to “Use whatever means you must to reduce the population, just do it!”
Eager to follow orders, Guangdong provincial officials had directed local officials to stop couples from having more than one or, at most, two children. Couples were only allowed a second child, the new rule said, if more than four years had elapsed since the birth of their first. Third and higher order children were absolutely forbidden.
The Communist Party official in charge of Junan People’s Commune, where I was living, wasted no time. He rounded up all the women in the commune who were pregnant “illegally” — there were hundreds — and told them that they would have to have abortions. Those who refused were placed under arrest and incarcerated — sometimes for weeks or months — until they bowed to the inevitable.
The commune medical clinic was turned into a killing field. Women less than five months pregnant were given immediate abortions. Women more than five months pregnant were given lethal injections into the womb to kill their unborn children and bring on uterine contractions. If the dead or dying baby was not expelled naturally within a day or two, they were removed by cesarean section abortions of the kind I had witnessed. Then they were buried in unmarked graves.
As far as I know, I am the first and only Western eyewitness to the kinds of horrors — forced abortions, forced sterilizations, infanticide, and the like — which are typical of China’s one-child policy down to the present day. Ironically enough, it was the architect of that policy, Deng Xiaoping himself, who was responsible for my being in China in the first place. The Chinese side had turned down my research proposal when it was initially advanced by the U.S. State Department. Deng had overruled them.
So I got to see first-hand what he had wrought.
The one-child policy was not formally announced until 25 September 1980, but was already in effect in several provinces for many months prior to that date. (The Chinese Party-State likes to “test” its grand experiments in social engineering in a province or two prior to implementing them on a national basis.)
Thirty-five years later, the one-child policy continues to take a terrible toll on Chinese women.
The pro-life Population Research Institute is dedicated to ending human rights abuses committed in the name of "family planning," and to ending counter-productive social and economic paradigms premised on the myth of "overpopulation." Find us at pop.org.
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