China’s One Child Policy represents “the biggest abuse against womens rights of any time in history” a leading human rights campaigner has said.
25th April 2012
Reggie Littlejohn, President of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, an organisation dedicated to highlighting the human rights abuses which flow from China’s controversial population control measure, was speaking in Dublin last night in the Gresham Hotel at and event organised by the Pro Life Campaign.
Ms. Littlejohn was in Ireland to brief politicians in Dáil Éireann about her work and told members of the Oireachtas that the Chinese One Child Policy was believed to have prevented the lives of over 400 million people who would otherwise have been born to Chinese couples.
And she said that the policy was leading to “gendercide”, the disproportionate killing of unborn girls.
She said: “According to a recent study published in the British Medical Journal, the overall sex ratio for China is 120 boys for every 100 girls. Nine provinces had ratios of over 160 boys for every 100 girls, for second children. The article stated, ‘Sex selective abortion accounts for almost all the excess males.’”
She explained that, as a result of this, sex trafficking, sexual slavery and abduction of female children was a growing problem in Chinese society.
Littlejohn also said that the Policy was responsible for horrific violations of womens’ human rights.
She said: “Many women die during these forced abortions and forced sterilizations. The doctors are not professionally trained in many cases.
“Women who don’t have birth permits are forced to undergo abortion, their pregnancies are deemed ‘illegal pregnancies’ and the family planning police are employed to remedy this through coerced and force abortions and forced sterilisations.”
After showing video clips of women being interviewed about the violent ways in which the One Child Policy is enforced Littlejohn said: “The One Child Policy is not a question of choice. There is no choice involved when a woman is physically dragged off the streets and forced against her will to abort a baby that she desperately wants.”
She noted that the Chinese Government operated a “point system” for government workers to encourage more late term abortions. Under the scheme, the later in the pregnancy the abortion happens the more points the family planning police employee gained, Littlejohn said.
“China’s one child policy causes more violence against women and girls than any other official policy on earth,” she added.
She said: “There is no more intimate part of a woman’s body than her womb. For the Chinese Communist Party to function as “womb police,” wielding the very power of life and death over the people of China is a terrible violation of both women’s rights and human rights. After 31 years of such a legacy, one thing is clear: it is time for the international community to rise up against this crime against humanity.”
Ms Littlejohn also highlighted the plight of Chen Guangcheng to members of the Oireachtas. Guangcheng is a lawyer and human rights activist under house arrest in China for a number of years because of his work exposing human rights abuses.