Recent news reports suggest that the Chinese Communist Party is considering abandoning one of its longest-running and most abusive practices: its reproduction planning policy, commonly known as the one-child policy.
The decision comes as the nation faces a number of domestic crises resulting from the policy, from a rapidly aging labor force to severe gender imbalances. Returning reproductive rights to the people, however, does not exempt the Communist Party from responsibility for decades of trauma and murder committed under the euphemistic rubric of population planning.
It’s hard to describe the devastation I witnessed. The voices and stories of those suffering will remain with me always. Women were physically and mentally traumatized, families torn apart.
Generations of desperately wanted children were literally left to die on the hospital floor. How do people recover from this?
In the United States, China’s one child policy has remained out of bounds for bipartisan action because it seems to touch on one of the hot-button issues of America’s left-right divide: abortion.
Yet I would ask Americans on all sides to put aside their own debates and look at the realities of China.
This is about mass-scale abduction, imprisonment, physical violation, torture, forced medical procedures, extortion and the murder of healthy infants born full-term, none of which are relevant to the American debate about reproductive rights.