Women’s Rights Without Frontiers founder and president Reggie Littlejohn unveiled the terror of China’s state policy of forced abortion, sterilization and infanticide as well as the cultural practices in India that see girl babies aborted or killed shortly after birth because women are not valued.
Littlejohn spoke on the steps of Parliament at the march, as well as at the annual Rose Dinner that evening and to about 900 high school students packing the annual Youth Conference in conjunction with the march May 10. She discussed how the Chinese government’s One Child Policy has become the “glue to keeping the Chinese Communist Party in place.”
While terror was once seen as a by-product of the One Child Policy, “now terror is the purpose of the policy,” Littlejohn said. “The One Child Policy touches every family in China. It’s a tool of social control masquerading as population control.”
The Yale law school graduate and litigation lawyer named names and showed pictures of young Chinese women who had been “dragged from their homes” and forced to have late-term abortions of “children they want.”
The issue of forced abortion is “really challenging the pro-choice community,” Littlejohn said. “You can’t support forced abortion. It’s not a choice.” She warned people not to believe media reports the Chinese government has ended its One Child Policy. Even if the state allows more than one child, the issue remains the same, she said.
“A two-child policy does not address the wrongs of the One Child Policy. The centrepiece of that policy is the government is telling people how many children they can have and enforcing it coercively.”
She described a network of informants and Child Planning Police who break into the homes of women who are pregnant illegally.
“China’s One Child Policy causes more violence to women and children than any other state policy on Earth,” she said. China boasts the elimination of 400 million lives through its policy, she said. This amounts to 13 million abortions a year; 36,000 a day, 1,500 an hour. “The great hemorrhage of human life today is flowing out of China,” she said.
India has laws against the dowry system, but the cultural practice of forcing families to provide money and property when their daughters marry has led to sex-selective abortion, infanticide of girls, neglect of girls’ health and the murder of 100,000 women a year related to dowry issues, she said. Those murders are often not investigated.
China and India eliminate more girls than are born in America every year, she said, calling “It’s a girl,” the three deadliest words in the world.
The abortion of baby girls has resulted in 37 million more young men than young women in China, with a similar skewed population in India, she said. This huge population of men unable to find wives has fueled human trafficking, sex slavery and children being made forced brides, she said.