Free Republic

When China put in place its one-child pol­icy four decades ago, pol­icy mak­ers said they would sim­ply switch gears if births dropped too much. That has turned out to be not so easy. “In 30 years, the cur­rent prob­lem of es­pe­cially dread­ful pop­u­la­tion growth may be al­le­viated and then [we can] adopt dif­fer­ent pop­u­la­tion poli­cies,” the Com­mu­nist Party said in a 1980 open let­ter to mem­bers and young peo­ple. With the num­ber of births de­clin­ing year af­ter year, China is now rac­ing in the op­po­site di­rec-tion, clos­ing abor­tion clin­ics and ex­pand­ing ser­vices to help cou­ples con­ceive. But a legacy of...

A Chinese attorney who escaped house arrest in his home country for his efforts to protect women from forced abortion for violating the government’s one-child policy said on Thursday that in the 35 years since the practice hundreds of millions of babies have been killed. “Over the past 35 years, China has killed a total of 360 to 400 million young lives as a result of its inhumane and violent birth control policies,” Chen Guangcheng, now senior fellow at Catholic University of America said at a hearing of the Congressional Executive Commission on China. “During a six-month period of 2005,...

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) conducted its Seventh National Population Census (hereinafter referred to as the Census) using 00:00 hours of Nov. 1, 2020, as the reference time. Although an official government report of the census reveals an increase in China’s population, the CCP hastily launched the “three-child policy” because its economic growth, which is “stable with a growing momentum,” as claimed by the state-owned People’s Daily in May, is actually no match for the current fertility crisis in China. An unnamed senior official from the CCP Health and Family Planning Commission revealed three sets of data during an interview...

Forty years ago, on September 25, 1980, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party sent a letter to all party members, urging them to support the Party’s “one-child” policy. The “one-child” policy was the brainchild of CCP leader Deng Xiaoping. After more than two decades of endless political movements and disastrous socialist policies, Deng’s predecessor, Mao Tse-dung, left behind an impoverished nation on the verge of collapse.When Deng assumed power in 1978, China’s gross domestic product per capita was only $156 — much less than Mexico’s $1,580. Deng recognized that the only way to save the CCP’s one-party...

Funny how truth will out sometimes. Here's news of a new documentary out that's being promoted by the left-leaning Daily Beast: Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival, and premiering in select theaters on August 9 courtesy of Amazon, directors Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang's heartrending documentary examines their native China's one-child policy, which functioned as a systematic attack on its female population—and which resulted in collateral damage on an international scale. In effect from 1979 to 2015, China's policy placed strict guidelines on reproduction in order to curb population growth, which Wang's mother proclaims...

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Rabia Kanwal’s parents were sure her marriage to a wealthy Chinese Muslim she had just met would give her a comfortable future, far from the hardships of their lives in Pakistan. But she had a premonition. “I was not excited,” said Ms. Kanwal, 22, who lives in a poor neighborhood in the city of Gujranwala, in the eastern province of Punjab. “I felt something bad was going to happen.” Arranged marriages are common in Pakistan, but this one was unusual. The groom, who said he was a rich poultry farmer, met Ms. Kanwal’s family during a monthslong...

From the claim that the U.S. “kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon” to an assertion that the Taliban “is not our enemy,” former Vice President Joe Biden may find himself defending some of his past foreign policy stances as the 2020 presidential contest gets underway. […] During a 2011 visit to China as vice president, Biden referred to the communist government’s population limitation regime but with no mention of its coercive nature. Rather he expressed an understanding for the policy, saying he was not “second-guessing” the Chinese over the issue. “Your policy has been one which I fully understand — I’m...

In 2006 I wrote an international bestseller about demography. Which is harder to do than you might think. But it was leavened with Dean Martin gags and whatnot. Nevertheless, it made some big-picture points: Will China be the hyperpower of the 21st century? Answer: No. Its population will get old before it's got rich. That's a cute line. I've been using it since the dawn of the millennium and I've been interested to watch it catch on. A few years back, I had the pleasure of hearing Henry Kissinger use it: It sounds so much more geopolitically persuasive in his...

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton... suggested during the third presidential debate that China had already ended the practice of forced abortion. On Wednesday evening, Clinton defended abortion rights and reiterated her promise to appoint Supreme Court justices who lean on the pro-choice side. The Democrat also said she has "been to countries where governments either forced women to have abortions, like they used to do in China." "With all her experience as former Secretary of State, it is untrue and deeply disappointing for Hillary Clinton to put the Chinese government's practice of forced abortion in the past," said Littlejohn in...

The vast majority of Chinese people are celebrating. The 18th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party has officially decreed it will cease enforcing the one-child-only policy this coming March after 35 years as part of its 13th Five Year Plan.Just speaking for myself, the triple whammy of infanticide, coerced abortions and forced sterilizations seem . . . well, not good. Bad, even. Really bad. Or more precisely, the policy is undeniably evil, tyrannical, totalitarian . . . you know, if I were to employ such "harsh" and "extreme" language.But not everyone sees it my way.Back in 1990, Molly Yard...

Senator Ted Cruz spoke out Wednesday against horrific forced abortions in China via its "totalitarian" one-child policy. In a speech on the Senate floor, he proposed "shaming" the one-party communist state by renaming the street on which the Chinese embassy is located after an imprisoned political dissident and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. During his remarks, Cruz called out Senator Dianne Feinsteins's objection to the passage of a resolution towards this end.Cruz began with China's one-child policy and forced abortions. He recalled the story of Feng Jianmei, who was abducted from her apartment in June of 2012 after her husband...

....Despite China's recent announcement that it was "abandoning" its longstanding one-child policy, critics have been quick to note that China is not abandoning anything and that the cosmetic change in policy signals no real change whatsoever in the way the Communist Party will continue to exercise despotic control over family life and reproduction, including through forced abortions and sterilizations.In speaking of the policy on the Senate floor Wednesday, Cruz had a poster-size photo brought out showing a woman with a dead child next to her on a hospital bed."I want to talk to you about Feng Jianmei," Cruz said. "PRC...

This isn't a government policy. Yet. But it's influential among the sorts of people who eventually make policies through NGOs and media pressure campaigns. China has abandoned its One Child Policy complete with forced abortions. But to some in the UK, it's looking quite good. As a GP, Hayes feels strongly that medical professionals should encourage people to have smaller families. “Doctors should be promoting replacement number of children; two per couple, one per single parent,” she says. “We don’t need to do this by coercion, we just need to talk about it.” Likewise Claire Coveney, 32, who decided at...

It’s astounding to review the requirements to be legally married in America. Even more astounding is the reality that Americans, and especially Christians, comply with them. Worse still— Christians continue to demand that the government regulate a predominantly Christian practice. (Monogamous heterosexual marriage is a unique New Testament Christian concept. Nearly all non-Christian faiths advocate polygamy and pedophilia as part of acceptable social marriage norms.) America’s oligarchic-republican-democratic government currently requires citizens to receive government permission to be legally married—similar to requiring the Chinese to receive government permission to legally have a child. Imagine living in a country where couples are...

When China announced it was relaxing its one-child policy in late 2013, marketing director Kang Lu chatted with her husband about whether they wanted a second baby. “But given our current circumstances, we quickly abandoned the idea,” she said. “It wasn’t a tough decision.” They weren’t alone. So far, a good number of Chinese families have been less than enthusiastic about the partial relaxation of the policy, choosing to stick with one child, often for practical and economic reasons, but also because decades of government propaganda have convinced them that one child really is best. Experts say this only underlines...

In the late 1960s through the 1970s, there was a panic that the Earth’s population, if not controlled, would lead to mass food shortages, water shortages, death, wars and the end of civilization as it existed. But much like the “global cooling” movement during the same period, it was proven to be horribly, horribly wrong. The book “The Population Bomb,” published in 1968, warned that by the 1980s there would be massive upheaval and starvation because of overpopulation. The 80s came and went, and even though the Earth’s population has nearly doubled, from 4 billion in 1974 to 7 billion...

At an event on Thursday at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., Reggie Littlejohn, founder and president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, used a Chinese Communist Party official’s statistic to point out how many babies have been aborted in the 34 years since the one-child per couple policy was put in place. “Forced abortion is not a choice,” Littlejohn said. “The Chinese Communist Party has become the enemy of the people, and has boasted that it has prevented 400 million lives through the one child policy.” “That is a greater number than the entire population of the United States and...

The woman on the operating table was nearly eight months pregnant. The doctor picked up a scalpel and made a transverse incision across her lower abdomen. Soon he was through the uterine wall, and removing a perfectly formed baby boy. The little boy was dead, of course, having been killed by lethal injection into the uterus the day before. It was March 1980, and the Chinese Party-State had just gotten deadly serious about population control. The year before, Vice Premier Chen Muhua, the female head of China’s Family Planning Board, had let it be known that “Socialism should make it...

Former Vice President Al Gore raised eyebrows last week when he suggested that “fertility management” was the key to fighting global warming and promoting economic development in poor countries. Gore’s comments drew criticism from free-marketeers who said his remarks amount to “eco-imperialism.” “Gore’s agenda for saving the world from global warming has always included population control,” Myron Ebell, director of global warming and international environmental policy at the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “Advocating population control specifically for Africa is just another form of imperialism. Gore’s eco-imperialism is uncomfortably close to the original racist goals...

When her mind is clear, Gong Qifeng can recall how she begged for mercy. Several people pinned her head, arms, knees and ankles to a hospital bed before driving a syringe of labor-inducing drugs into her stomach. She was seven months pregnant with what would have been her second boy. The drugs caused her to have a stillborn baby after 35 hours of excruciating pain. She was forced to have the abortion by officials in China’s southern province of Hunan in the name of complying with national limits on family size. […] Since the abortion more than two years ago,...