Obama, Chinese President Urged to End 'Barbaric' Forced Abortions Policy
As U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping met over Friday and Saturday for two days of informal meetings, an international coalition urged them to bring an end to China's one-child policy.
"This brutal policy causes more violence against women and girls than any other official policy on earth, and any official policy in the history of the world," Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women's Rights Without Frontiers, wrote in a letter addressed to the leaders of the world's two biggest superpowers.
The group, which fights against sexual slavery and forced abortion in China, says it has over 200,000 signatures from people in 70 different countries that are raising awareness on what it calls China's "barbaric population control program," responsible for the deaths and exploitation of millions of girls.
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"China's 'population problem' is not that it has too many people, but that it has too few young people. China will get old before it gets rich," Littlejohn said in an email to The Christian Post.
China, the world's most populated country, now at over 1.3 billion people, says that it implements the one-child policy, which restricts some families to only having one child, as a means for controlling its population.
The WRWF president explained, however, that because parents often choose to keep sons over daughters, the Asian country now has the most skewed sex ratio in the world – 118 to 120 boys born for every 100 girls.
"This gendercide is a major driving force, not only within China, but from the surrounding countries as well. The only way to rectify these problems is to abandon all coercive birth limitations. I do not believe that doing so will result in a population explosion in China, as it is costly to raise and educate children there," Littlejohn said.
Xi and Obama mostly discussed issues such as the North Korea nuclear threat, the fight against global climate change, and cybersecurity over the two-day period aimed at creating "a more comfortable relationship" between the two world leaders.
In her letter to the presidents, Littlejohn shared a number of the big cases concerning suffering caused by the one-child policy that have made it to Western news media, but also added that there are thousands or even millions more that "suffer silently."
As far as what it will take to end forced abortions in China, the WRWF president told CP that it will be necessary to end coercive low birth limitation.
"So long as the government requires that women have only one child or two children, forced abortion will exist," Littlejohn said, arguing that the ruling Communist Party must end its "social compensation fee" requirement of up to ten times a person's annual salary.
"These 'terror fines' amount to coercion, as very few people have the ability to pay them. Third, the Chinese Communist Party needs to stop evaluating officials based on whether they have reached their family planning targets or quotas. Giving rewards and punishments to officials based on meeting family planning quotas encourages coercion. Fourth, the CCP needs to prosecute those who forcibly abort or sterilize women," she continued.
Women's Rights Without Frontiers directly tries to save baby girls from gendercide in China with its "Save a Girl" campaign, which also supports women who are fleeing from forced abortion, who cannot even turn to hospitals for help because they fear their baby will be confiscated or killed.
"President Jinping, you are in a unique position to stop this horrendous violence against women. May the end of the One Child Policy be your enduring legacy to the Chinese people," Littlejohn concludes in her letter.
"President Obama, you are a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Please live up to your acceptance of this award urging the end of violence against women through coercive family planning in China."
