The story of blind human rights activist Chen Guancheng’s daring escape from house arrest to the U.S. embassy in Beijing, and his subsequent release to a Chinese hospital has received much attention. The media storm grew when reports came out revealing that Chen left the embassy only after U.S. officials told him that Chinese officials were threatening his family’s life if he remained at the embassy. He claims that U.S. officials ensured him of his and his family’s safety if he left for the hospital, and that U.S. officials would be in the hospital with him.
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| Photo Source: Wikipedia |
But when Chen arrived, there were no American officials, and he found himself alone with the very government whose torturous custody he fled only a few days earlier. Chen shocked the world, however, when after a period of no communication, he called in to an emergency Congressional human rights hearing held by pro-life hero Representative Chris Smith (R-NJ). Now, the U.S. and China have reportedly come to an agreement to ensure Chen and his family’s safety and travel to America.
For all the justified attention on Chen’s escape and the leadership failure by the Obama administration and State Department, the driving force behind Chen’s activism has largely been ignored: forced abortions. Systematic forced abortions and forced sterilizations by Chinese government family planning officials to enforce its one-child policy.
In villages across China, women who want more than one child are subjected to heavy, unaffordable fines or forced abortion and sterilization. In her testimony, Reggie Littlejohn, founder of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, cited one city where 130,000 forced abortions were performed over the course of one year. She called the one-child policy the “central policy of the Chinese Communist party.” And while forced abortions typically receive the obligatory mention as the practice that Chen has so heroically fought against, its accompanying tragedy, sex-selective abortions, has received almost zero attention.
This silence from the White House on this matter should come as no surprise. The Obama Administration has consistently placed the goals of the abortion-lobby at the top of its agenda. Meanwhile, the main-stream media disguises the violent act of abortion as “reproductive health.”
Planned Parenthood, the nation’s #1 abortion provider, cannot bring itself to condemn sex-selective abortion, instead choosing to emphasize their “non-judgmental” service, and remaining completely silent on forced abortions in China.
Their dogmatic insistence on abortion as an absolute necessity – a good – for women prevents them from condemning the one-child policy in any measured way, even though women are the prime targets.
Women are being physically forced against their will to kill their child and undergo sterilization. Baby girls are aborted at a shockingly high rate because if a family can only have one-child, they want to make sure it’s a boy. Despite it all, Planned Parenthood and the Obama administration remain silent – or worse – silently approving. The Obama administration restored funding to the UNFPA, which supports China’s one-child policy and denies that coercive abortions are carried out by government officials in China. Chen Guangcheng is where he is right now because he dared to disagree.
Amidst all these laudable efforts to free Chen Guancheng and bring him and his family to safety, let us not forget the reasons and the cause that resulted in his arrest and brutal treatment: women and unborn children. Let us honor Chen Guancheng by standing with him in his fight to save the lives of women and unborn children from the violence of abortion.
