Combating forced abortion and gendercide in China

By Mary C. Tillotson

Reggie Littlejohn, Women's Rights Without Frontiers

Today is the 33rd anniversary of China's one-child policy, which has been devastating for Chinese women and girls. I just got off the phone with Reggie Littlejohn, founder and president of Women's Rights Without Frontiers, an organization dedicated to stopping forced abortions and gendercide in China. Reggie has testified with governments around the world, and her organization is running the Save a Girl Campaign, helping families on the grassroots level.

I'm going to let Reggie take it from here.

Tell me about the one-child policy in China.

Reggie: Some in the Chinese Communist Party want you to believe it's entirely voluntary. That is not true. Women are forcibly aborted up to the ninth month of pregnancy, and also forcibly sterilized. Some of these forced abortions are so violent that the women themselves die with their full-term babies.

The coercion gives rise to gendercide. Because of the coercive low birth limit, most families want to make sure they have a boy. Sex selective abortion is practiced, and up to 200 million women are missing in the world today due to sex-selective abortion. There are 37 million more men than women living in China.

What that gender imbalance is doing is it's driving human trafficking and sexual slavery, not only in China but in the surrounding countries as well.

Why do they have a preference for boys?

Reggie: Preference for boys is something that's centuries or possibly millennia old. It's prominent in Asia, but especially in China and India.

In both Indian culture and Chinese culture, when a couple gets married, the girl goes over to the boy's family, and the young woman and young man together support the young man's parents in their old age. If you give birth to a son, you know that when he marries, you will be gaining a daughter-in-law, so you're getting an addition to your family, whereas if you give birth to a daughter, you're not getting a son-in-law, you're losing your daughter also.

If you can only have one kid and it's a girl, you don't have anybody to support you in your old age. [Parents often have to choose between] sex-selective abortion or facing poverty in old age.

What is Women's Rights Without Frontiers doing about it?

Reggie met Pope Francis last week.

Reggie: We are doing two things. Number one, we've been called the leading voice in the world to expose and oppose forced abortions in China - forced abortion, gendercide, and sexual slavery in China. We gather documentation and go around and sound the alarm all over the world about what's going on in China.

Most people understand China has a one-child policy. They don't understand the brutality of the way it's enforced.

We gather documentation from China about forced abortion, forced sterilization, human trafficking, murder, all these things that are committed in connection with the one-child policy, and we testify.

We have credibility and a voice in informing government bodies about the truth about what's going on in China, concerning the one-child policy.

Reggie has testified six times at the United States Congress and three times at the European Parliament; she's also testified to the British, Irish, and Canadian Parliaments. She's briefed White House officials, the U.S. Department of State, the United Nations, and the Vatican. She's also spoken multiple times at the United Nations Commission on the Status of women, an annual convention in New York; the commission made a statement condemning forced abortion, forced sterilization, and forced contraception.

The other thing we do, we have a Save a Girl campaign.

Tell me about the Save a Girl Campaign.

Reggie: We've got workers on the ground in China who identify women who are pregnant with girls who are planning to have an abortion, or who have just given birth to a girl and are planning to abandon her. They say, 'Please don't abort or abandon your baby because she's a girl. We'll give you a monthly stipend for a year to help support this girl.'

I understand, from my network, we have a 95 percent success rate. We're saving lives in China.

We also help women who are fleeing forced abortion. We are stopping gendercide in China one baby girl at a time.

The Save a Girl Campaign was launched last year on October 11, the International Day of the Girl Child.

What can regular people do to help?

Reggie: If people want to do something to help these girls, we have petitions to stop forced abortion, and they can also donate toward the Save a Girl Campaign. It's amazing how little it takes to save a life in China.

So much of our effort has to do with getting the word out, and people help get the word out by liking the article you write, posting it on Facebook, tweeting it - that's huge for us. It's the only way we can turn political opinion to understand what's going on and oppose the violence against women.

People are listening to us, listening to our message.

Never again war!

By Mary C. Tillotson

Pope Francis has invited the world to pray and fast today for peace - specifically in Syria and the rest of the Middle East. While courage is noble, war is always horrible, and world leaders have an obligation to their citizens and to the rest of humanity to work to avoid war whenever possible.

image courtesy Freedom House, flickr

I think that's often easy for us in the comfortable first world to forget. I tried to read Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning but had to stop because I couldn't handle his descriptions of the Nazi concentration camp. George Weigel's descriptions of Karol Wotijla (later Pope John Paul II)'s youth in occupied Poland were harrowing to me. Human beings are capable of awful, awful evil.

This NYT slideshow of Purple Hearts shows some of the human faces that came out of war. (Warning: don't click unless you have time to pause and think, maybe cry.) Mark Shea wrote (and followed up here) criticizing politicians who don't take the human factor into account when sending human troops to unjust, unnecessary wars.

I am all for honor, bravery, and all these good things our servicemen and women live out. But it's not fair for politicians or anyone to tear apart bodies and families - Americans, Syrians, Muslims, Christians, atheists, anyone - without a very good reason.

Let's join Pope Francis and pray for peace in Syria and the Middle East, and let's work for peace in our families and communities.

Dear Brothers and Sisters, Hello! 

Today, dear brothers and sisters, I wish to make add my voice to the cry which rises up with increasing anguish from every part of the world, from every people, from the heart of each person, from the one great family which is humanity: it is the cry for peace! It is a cry which declares with force: we want a peaceful world, we want to be men and women of peace, and we want in our society, torn apart by divisions and conflict, that peace break out! War never again! Never again war! Peace is a precious gift, which must be promoted and protected.

There are so many conflicts in this world which cause me great suffering and worry, but in these days my heart is deeply wounded in particular by what is happening in Syria and anguished by the dramatic developments which are looming.

I appeal strongly for peace, an appeal which arises from the deep within me. How much suffering, how much devastation, how much pain has the use of arms carried in its wake in that martyred country, especially among civilians and the unarmed! I think of many children will not see the light of the future! With utmost firmness I condemn the use of chemical weapons: I tell you that those terrible images from recent days are burned into my mind and heart. There is a judgment of God and of history upon our actions which are inescapable! Never has the use of violence brought peace in its wake. War begets war, violence begets violence.

Read his whole address (it's not very long) here.