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Obama Missing in Action on Forced Abortion

Obama Missing in Action on Forced Abortion

Midsummer is a time when nations reflect on their liberty and the profound price paid for it.  In the United States, we celebrate the Fourth of July; in France La Fete Nationale on July 14th; to our north, Canada Day on July 1.  None of these commemorations, however, can be understood merely as national holidays or insular traditions, despite their roots in particular eras and events.  These holidays derive their meaning from their appeal to universal sentiments about human freedom and self-governance.  They also keep those sentiments alive in places where similar anniversaries cannot be observed.

Take the People’s Republic of China.  Scholars today debate just what kind of tyranny communist China represents.  It is something new in the world, a nation whose rulers have built a society equally congenial to rapid economic growth and the ruthless crushing of personal and political liberty.   It is a one-party state pursuing a one-child policy, with extraordinary wealth accumulating for some families while blood and squalor are the daily lot of others.  Summertime in China brings the anniversary of the student uprising at Tiananmen Square, but it remains a crime there to publicize the events of June 4, 1989, much less to renew the call for liberty made that day by thousands of student martyrs.

The summer of 2012 underscored this reality in the drama over Chen Guangcheng, the blind activist who has done the most to shed light on China’s forced abortion and sterilization policies.  Not even the aura of a Western celebrity like Christian Bale could pierce the dark night of captivity China’s omnipresent police force inflicted on Chen.  Bale was rebuffed and roughed up by these ubiquitous thugs last December when he attempted to visit a man he rightly hailed as a hero for human rights.  It was only when Chen, in an act of derring-do even the fictional Batman would admire, escaped from house arrest and made his way to the U.S. Embassy that American officials took notice.

We may never know what concessions U.S. officials made in order to secure an exit visa to the United States for Chen and his family.  After all, the U.S. economy is now perilously dependent on the goodwill of our Chinese creditors.  And despite its many protestations of concern over the brutal policy Chen has so meticulously documented, the Obama Administration has lapsed again into the studied silence about coercive population control that has dominated U.S. foreign policy under recent Democratic presidents.  That silence, in the face of what sinologist Stephen Mosher describes as “the longest-running and most far-reaching violation of human rights the world has ever seen,” is itself an enormous scandal.

Despite our financial dependency, the Chinese government is not immune to global pressure, as every freed Chinese activist has reminded us on reaching the West.  Chen’s release is but one example, but others continue to accumulate.  Recently, when “family planning” officials in Shaanxi Province carried out a forced abortion on the seven-month-old child of Feng Jianwei, outraged Chinese called on the government to investigate and criminally prosecute the officials for their assault on Mrs. Feng and her murdered baby.  We are a long way from such prosecutions in China but the call for them, and the echo chamber of Western media, put this redress of grievance on the horizon of the possible.

It is time, however, for the United States to do more – consistently and visibly – to champion the liberty of Chinese families to determine the size of their families without state interference.  First, the United States should end, permanently, its financial support for the United Nations Population Fund, an able and willing participant in providing both infrastructure and “cover” for China’s abuses.  As Mosher pointed out in recent Congressional testimony, the UNFPA has been a handmaiden of the one-child policy from its inception four decades ago.  In 1998 the UNFPA made much of its role in establishing “model counties” in China where, it asserts, the state population policy is pursued vountarily and humanely.  But Mosher’s three-year investigation of these counties found that they differ not at all in the prosecution of China’s war on “excess births.”

Mosher records the specifics: official postings of the coercive policies (which include fines on parents that reach into many multiples of their annual income if they have “unauthorized” children), testimonies of forced abortion and sterilization, and inclusion of Chinese minorities like the Manchu, Uighurs, and Tibetans in the policy’s dragnet.  In addition to ending support for the UNFPA, the Obama Administration could do much more in international bodies to publicize and condemn China’s practices, just as the European Parliament recently did in adopting a strong resolution calling for the end of coercive family planning.

Today Chen Guangcheng and his family are free, but millions more Chinese families suffer unabated intimidation, torture and assault.  The war on women in China is depressingly real, and in this phase the Obama Administration is missing in action.

 

Chuck Donovan is President of the Charlotte Lozier Institute, the education and research arm of the Susan B. Anthony List.

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