Chinese human rights advocate Chai Ling (CNSNews.com photo/Penny Starr)
A survivor of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in China appealed to President Barack Obama during a press conference on Tuesday to push Chinese President Hu Jintao to end the practice of forcing women to have an abortion as part of China's one-child-per-couple policy.
"President Obama, we're speaking to you as the president of this great nation, we also speak to you as a great father for your two beautiful children," said Chai Ling, who came to the United States in 1990 and founded All Girls Allowed, a Christian organization that helps Chinese victims of forced abortions and sterilization in China and works to end the practices.
"Just imagine, just imagine, among your two beautiful children, all you are allowed to have is one; the other one has to be put to death," Ling said.
"And President Obama, just imagine, among your two beautiful girls, if none of them would be allowed to live because they are only, and only because they are girls."
Ling began her remarks by citing chilling statistics about the forced abortion and sterilization policy in China.
"As we gather here in Washington, over 35,000 forced and coerced abortions are taking place today in China; every 2.5 seconds a precious baby's life is taken; among every six baby girls, one will never be born simply because she is a girl; 500 women will commit suicide, at five times the world average rate; 3,000 baby girls are abandoned on street corners; and more than 200 children and women are trafficked into slavery," Ling said.
Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) (CNSNews.com photo/Penny Starr)
Reps. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) and Frank Wolf (R-Va.) invited Ling and a large group of human rights activists to take part in the press conference, timed to coincide with the visit of the Chinese president.
Activists included former political prisoners and families of Chinese dissidents who have been jailed and tortured or have disappeared. Forced abortion was described at the conference as violence in China directed at women and girls.
"I particularly want to mention Chinese women," Smith said. "The Chinese government's one-child-per-couple policy, with its attendant horrors of forced abortion campaigns and rampant sex-selective abortion, is, in scope and seriousness, the worst human rights abuse – the worst gender crime – in the world today.
"Few people outside China understand what a massive and cruel system of social control the one-child policy entails," said Smith, who is a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and who, along with Wolf, has taken many humanitarian trips to China over the course of his more than 30 years in Congress.
"As the U.S. China Commission summarized, the system is 'marked by pervasive propaganda, mandatory monitoring of women's reproductive cycles, mandatory contraception, mandatory birth permits, coercive fines for failure to comply and . . . forced sterilization and abortion,'" Smith quoted.
Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women's Rights Without Frontiers who has testified before Congress on human rights and forced abortions in China, distributed a video that documents that violence against women.
"When I say forced abortion I mean women are literally dragged out of their homes and off the streets," Littlejohn says in the video. "They can be jailed in family planning jail cells, forced to abort children that they want and this can happen all the way up to the ninth month of pregnancy. Some of these forced abortions are so violent that the women themselves die along with their full-term babies."
Smith recounted the testimony of a Chinese woman who told the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission of the U.S. Congress that she was forced to have an abortion.
"Since it did not come out as expected, they decided to cut my baby into pieces in my womb with scissors and then suck it out with a special machine," the woman said. "I did not have any time to think as this most horrifying surgery began by force. I could hear the sound of the scissors cutting the body of my baby in the womb.
"Eventually, the journey in hell, the surgery, was finished, and one nurse showed me part of a bloody foot with her tweezers," the woman said.
"Through my tears, the picture of the bloody foot was engraved into my eyes and into my heart, and so clearly I could see the five small bloody toes," the woman said. "Immediately the body was thrown into a trashcan.
"The one-child policy and forced abortion policy have killed millions of innocent lives in China," the woman said.
Ling also spoke of the U.S. celebration of the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. at the press conference.
"Yesterday we celebrated Dr. King's birthday," Ling said. "His passionate dream led to a generation and a world that restores life, value and dignity to all races. Today, we too have a dream," Ling said. "We dream a dream that will restore life, value and dignity to all children, all gender, in China and around the world.
"We dream a dream that tomorrow China's forced one-child policy will become history; we dream a dream that children will grow up with brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts; we dream a dream that all tears will be wiped from the faces of parents whose children were taken," Ling said.
Source: CNSNews.com
