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No, Hillary, China has not stopped forced abortions
This photo taken Monday, Dec. 13, 2010 shows an image of a three-month-old fetus during a sonogram scan for "Nancy" Yin at a clinic run by Marie Stopes International in Xi'an in central China's Shaanxi province. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

No, Hillary, China has not stopped forced abortions

During the final presidential debate, Hillary Clinton claimed that forced abortions are a thing of the past in China. But human rights advocates say such violations of women's rights in China's one-child policy are still are occurring.

By Steven Mosher, for TheBlaze

During the final presidential debate, Hillary Clinton said [emphasis added]:

“I’ve been to countries where governments either forced women to have abortions like they used to do in China or forced women to bear children like they used to do in Romania.”

Fact-check: False

Contrary to Clinton’s claim that forced abortions are a thing of the past in China, human rights advocates say they still are occurring.

Reggie Littlejohn, the head of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, says that forced abortions are still happening in China’s “Planned Birth” policy, despite the move to a two-child policy.

This photo taken Monday, Dec. 13, 2010 shows an image of a three-month-old fetus during a sonogram scan for "Nancy" Yin at a clinic run by Marie Stopes International in Xi'an in central China's Shaanxi province. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

“Couples will still have to have a birth permit for the first and the second child, or they are subject to forced abortion,” Littlejohn said. “The core of the One Child Policy is not how many children the government allows couples to have. It’s the existence of a limit on childbearing, and the coercive enforcement of this limit coercively. Women are still being forcibly aborted in China whether Clinton knows it or not.”

In August, the BBC published an interview with a Chinese Communist Family Planning Official about the new two-child policy. According to the report, couples who have third children still face coercion and may be forced to abort their unborn child if they cannot pay.

“The new policy does not ban forced abortions; it merely says that couples can have two children,” explains Bill Donohue of the Catholic League. “Which means that the government will have to continue its practice of monitoring a woman’s menstrual cycle and fining those who are pregnant with their third child. If they are unable to pay, they will be dragged to a local clinic and injected with a lethal drug.”

LifeNews has reported several recent accounts of Chinese mothers who were forced to abort their unborn babies as late as nine months under its continuing, state-run “Planned Birth” policy.

That policy, which began in 1980, shows no sign of ending. Chinese Planned Birth officials still jail couples who refuse to abort, sentence them to house arrest or labor camps, revoke jobs or governmental support, use physical harassment or violence and often target other family members. And they still resort to forced abortion to keep “illegal” children from seeing the light of day.

Hillary Clinton is wrong so suggest that forced abortions are no longer a problem in China.

Steven W. Mosher is the President of the Population Research Institute, a former Commissioner of the Commission on Broadcasting to the PRC, and the author of the forthcoming, The Bully of Asia.

TheBlaze contributor channel supports an open discourse on a range of views. The opinions expressed in this channel are solely those of each individual author.

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