By Carol Tobias, NRLC President & Pro-Life Perspective Host
NRLC President Carol Tobias
We’ve been spending some time over the past few days studying a very fascinating, but also very sad, article from Spring 2012 issue of “The New Atlantis,” entitled “The Population Control Holocaust.” Written by Robert Zubrin, a contributing editor to the journal, it looks at the history of population control programs and the use of forced abortion and sterilization in such programs.
We ended yesterday’s discussion with a look at the forced sterilization and rampant gendercide of baby girls in India as a result of the government’s pledge to institute population control policies in order to receive foreign aid from other countries – including the United States. Today, we turn to Zubrin’s examination of China.
According to Zubrin, China’s one-child policy began with a conference in Helsinki where Song Jian, who was in charge of developing control systems for China’s guided-missile program, engaged in conversations with several Europeans who were promoting the use of computerize “systems analysis” to “predict and design the human future.”
“Fascinated by the possibilities,” Zubrin writes, Song returned to China. “With the help of a powerful computer to provide the necessary special effects, [Song] issued the profoundly calculated judgment that China’s ‘correct’ population size was 650 to 700 million people — which is to say some 280 to 330 million less than its actual 1978 population.” He proposed “that China’s rulers set a limit of one child per family, effective immediately.”
The word soon came down from the top: one child per family was now the policy of the infallible Party leadership, and no further disagreements would be tolerated.
“Thus began the most forceful population control program since Nazi Germany. No more would the population controllers need to depend on tricks, bribes, denial of benefits, traveling ligation festivals, or slum demolition platoons to obtain their victims. They now had the organized and unrelenting power of a totalitarian state to enforce their will, holding sway over not only a massive bureaucracy, but gigantic police and military forces, secret police, vast prison facilities, total media control, and tens of millions of informers. In The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich had called for state control of human reproduction, with ‘compulsory birth regulation.’ Now, just twelve years later, Ehrlich’s utopian dream had become a nightmare reality for one-fifth of the human race.”
A Soviet-trained major general, Qian Xinzhong, was put in charge of the program.
“He ordered that all women with one child were to have a stainless-steel IUD inserted, and to be inspected regularly to make sure that they had not tampered with it. To remove the device was deemed a criminal act. All parents with two or more children were to be sterilized. No pregnancies were legal for anyone under 23, whether married or not, and all unauthorized pregnancies were to be aborted. “Under no circumstances is the birth of a third child allowed,” Qian said.
“Women who defied these injunctions were taken and sterilized by force. Babies would be aborted right through the ninth month of pregnancy, with many crying as they were being stabbed to death at the moment of birth. Those women who fled to try to save their children were hunted, and if they could not be caught, their houses were torn down and their parents thrown in prison, there to linger until a ransom of 20,000 yuan — about three years’ income for a peasant — was paid for their release. Babies born to such fugitives were declared to be ‘black children,’ illegal non-persons in the eyes of the state, without any right to employment, public schooling, health care, or reproduction.
“The leaders of the UNFPA and the International Planned Parenthood Federation were delighted, and rushed to send money (provided to them primarily by the U.S. State Department) and personnel to help support the campaign. China was so openly brutal in its methods that IPPF’s own information officer, Penny Kane, expressed alarm — not at what was being done to millions of Chinese women, girls, and infants, but at the possible public-relations disaster that could mar the IPPF’s image if Americans found out what it was doing.”
We’ll leave off here for today and pick up tomorrow with a continuing look at Zubrin’s examination of China’s one-child population control policy and the long lasting effects of population control policies. In the mean time, more information can be found on our website at prolifeperpsective.com.
Your feedback is very important to improving National Right to Life News Today. Please send your comments to daveandrusko@gmail.com. If you like, join those who are following me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/daveha