Abortion advocates are scurrying around the world promoting their agenda.
Last week, at a conference in London, they crafted a document promoting the ability of “every woman in every country” to have access to legal abortion and “acceptable methods of family planning of their choice.”
But what about choices for women in China?
There, women and their families are being brutalized by population-control officials who have no regard for human rights.
Consider the case of Xiu Qin Wen. She married her husband, Xiao Lan Zheng, in 1992, but she was only 19 at the time. The Communist country requires men to be at least 22 years old and women 20 years old prior to getting married. Unmarried couples in China are not allowed to have children.
After Wen became pregnant, population officials forcibly aborted her baby and threatened Zheng with sterilization before he fled the country.
Kui Rong Ma and his wife Lei Chiu Ma also found themselves victims of China’s brutal regime. They too failed to meet official marriage requirements, and two months after a secret ceremony in their village, Chiu became pregnant. Knowing their fate, Chiu hid in her aunt’s house in another nearby village.
Ma attempted to register the marriage with Chinese authorities, but that only tipped them off to Chiu’s pregnancy. Soon officials banged on Ma’s door and demanded that he inform them of his wife’s location. When Ma refused to tell the officials where Chiu was hiding, they seized Ma’s 63-year-old father, threatening to place him in detention until Chiu presented herself for an abortion. Ma tried to stop the officials, but they beat him and took his father into custody.
Ma did not tell Chiu about his father’s detention, because he did not want her to surrender herself for a forced abortion. However, family-planning officials deliberately spread the news that Ma’s father had been placed in prison, hoping it would lead them to Chiu. When she learned of her father-in-law’s detention and heard he might be tortured because she was hiding, she went to the Family Planning Office to plead for his release.
She thought she might be able to persuade the officials to let her have their child, because the couple had no other children. Instead, family-planning officials arrested her and made her submit to an abortion. Her baby was weeks away from birth.
Chiu became physically and mentally ill following the late-term abortion and she encouraged Ma to leave the country and to send for her as soon as he reached the United States.
The two cases are the latest examples of American courts’ granting Chinese citizens asylum hearings as they escape their country’s policy of forced abortions and sterilizations. But where are “choice” advocates in all this? Where is the condemnation from Planned Parenthood and NARAL?
They’re too busy to notice, apparently.
Right now, a group of Dutch pro-abortion activists are camped out on Portugal’s doorstep. Renting a vessel that was formerly a tugboat, they sailed south in an attempt to outmaneuver pro-life Portuguese laws and distribute RU-486 abortion pills to women in international waters. (That’s the same drug that killed California teenager Holly Patterson last year and another teen in Sweden earlier this year.)
When they’re not promoting abortion at the U.N. or sailing to pro-life nations, “choice” advocates are blasting the Bush administration–for taking a stand against the complete lack of choice in China stemming from the forced-abortion thuggery there.
To his credit, President Bush has taken a hard line against the United Nations Population Fund and yanked U.S. taxpayer funding from the agency because of its tolerance of and participation in brutal Chinese population-control policies.
Groups that claim to be pro-choice couch their rhetoric in pro-woman terms. But when it comes to women and their families fleeing forced abortion in China, there’s no lifeboat for them–at least, none offered by the so-called advocates for women and choice.
–Steven Ertelt is the editor and CEO of LifeNews.com.