A Crisis of Compassion
by Melinda Tankard Reist
Zadok Perspectives Issue No. 64
Winter 1999

Part 3

IT WOULD HAVE BEEN easier for Australian and Chinese Government officials if Ms Zhu had conveniently merged with the hundreds of thousands of other female victims of Government authorised birth control terror. Zhu's surfacing confronted the Australian Government with the fruits of its aversion to pregnant Chinese women.

Ms Zhu was not the first pregnant women to be deported against her will. Another woman deported in January 1997 when five months pregnant, was believed to also have suffered forced abortion. Deportees with her had contacted refugee advocates in Western Australia to say she had been seized on arrival and taken away to be aborted.

An appeal for asylum for another Chinese woman pregnant with her fourth child also failed. Detention centre staff had allegedly refused her requests for a check up on a defective Chinese IUD which was causing her pain. She became pregnant and feared a late forced abortion, fines and imprisonment if returned to China. The Minister refused to intervene, saying that he had not considered and did not propose to consider whether to exercise his power to allow her to apply for refugee status. She was deported in May 1997.

Another woman who had suffered six forced abortions (two of them at six months) and had narrowly escaped forced sterilisation by seeking safety on Australian shores, also lost her case for asylum.

It emerged recently that two other pregnant women (one five or six months pregnant) were deported on the same flight as Ms Zhu. The Immigration Minister responded by saying this did not warrant investigation, saying no complaint had been received. (Maybe the women didn't know where in China they could go to complain.)

No Government can claim to be unaware of the human rights violations which face women like this. Three Senate Committee inquiries in recent years heard testimony from international authorities on family planning-related human rights abuses, along with first hand evidence from a Chinese abortionist who obtained asylum in Australia. The Hansard, submissions and subsequent reports would have been sitting on Ministerial bookshelves.

China perpetuates violence against women through the most barbaric fertility control plan in the world. Its policy has resulted in forced sterilisation, forced abortion, forced fitting of IUDs, female foeticide and infanticide and prenatal sex selection. A Chinese woman's right to bodily integrity and her freedom of conscience are forfeited daily.

To: Part 4

Melinda Tankard Reist Melinda Tankard Reist is a freelance writer with a special interest in bioethics, medical abuses of women and human rights abuses in population programs. She advises Senator Brian Harradine on these issues. Her forthcoming book, Giving Sorrow Words: Women's Stories of Abortion Grief, will be published in March next year by Duffy and Snellgrove.