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

Part 4

CHINA OBSERVES THE RIGHT to life, liberty and security of persons and the right to form and found a family by coercively aborting and sterilising thousands of women a year. In many parts of China, woman must present their blood-stained sanitary pads to family planning officials to prove they are not pregnant. Many must submit themselves for regular X-ray checks to ensure their IUD's are in place. Chinese orphanages, which some describe as "children's gulags", liquidate surplus baby girls by the thousands (see Death by Default: A Policy of Fatal Neglect in China's State Orphanages, Human Rights Watch, New York, 7 January 1996).

Fines for an illegal pregnancy can be more than a family's total annual income. Penalties for an unauthorised birth can amount to 40 percent of total income and continue up to 14 years. The children of non-conformists are penalised by being denied household registration, which is necessary to obtain medical care and other essential services. Dr John Aird, former senior research specialist on China at the US Bureau of Census, notes that they are known as "black" children ("China's Coercive Family Planning Program: Deception, Hypocrisy and Human Rights", Paper presented at a symposium on population problems at Grinnell College, Iowa, April 1993).
Amnesty International has reported on the persecution of Catholics in the northern province of Hebei for breaching birth control policies. A birth control campaign was launched against them under the slogan "Better to Have More Graves than More than One Child". The villagers were being subjected to detention, torture including electric shocks and fines by local officials who have set up a travelling court and prison equipped with instruments of torture ("Catholics 'tortured' over one-child policy", The Australian, 16 February 1995).

Probably the most harrowing testimony provided to the Australian parliament was that of Chinese gynaecologist Dr Wong, who was forced to carry out abortions up to eight months into the pregnancy at a hospital in Jiangsu province. Women were brought to her kicking and screaming and tied by their hands and feet to the table for the abortion. Dr Wong estimates she did at least 10,000 abortions in her seven years at the hospital. She was forced to kill almost full-term babies in the womb by lethal injection and put babies who survived abortion into rubbish bins to die.
Dr Wong, Who was granted asylum in Australia, told a Senate Legal and Constitutional Legislation Committee (6 February 1995):

In the hospital, you can see the women suffer and have pain for this one-child policy. It is only for this one-child policy that they came to the hospital; like they are coming to jail. They kill her baby, and they make her suffer. They make your heart break. This happens every day in China-every day. You can see the bodies of the babies-like a mountain of rubbish. Every day you see babies who want to try to get breath and who want to live. They did not die at first. They want to live. You saw miles of blood go out, and the mother crying. Every day mothers saw dead babies. The mothers catch the bare babies and cry.

Although a Christian, Dr Wong believes forgiveness is beyond her. In an interview which appeared in the former On Being magazine (August 1995):

Every year at Christmas time we have a show for the birth of Jesus. When I saw the baby (who was playing the part of) Jesus, I think: "I kill this baby . . . I don't think I'm really Christian. I think I'm opposite to a Christian because I do so many bad things," she told [this author] in an interview. "I didn't try and do something for Chinese women. I'm not a very brave woman, I'm weak. In my heart I know Christian always brave, the Christian dies for God, for human rights, for life, for the right things. These things I cannot do, so I am not a Christian. I am evil. I think if I say I am a Christian, no one believe me.

Recently (8 June 1999), Senator Brian Harradine received an anonymous letter from another former abortionist, also wrestling with forgiveness:

I gave forcible abortions and sterilisations to numerous women who wanted to have an extra child. I am confessing my sin for my hands are stained with blood . . . My conscience is printed with indelible sins . . . I repent and beg the god to forgive me from the sin and beg him to bless that boat woman and the safety of hundreds of thousands of women who suffer forcible abortions.

But blessing and safety are far off for women when up against Governments which chose not to accept the facts about the deliberate, systematic, institutionalised, government-sponsored violence against one fifth of the world's women.

The Immigration Minister prefers to cite Country Reports prepared by Departmental officials. "The country information available on China at the time of the case in question indicated that abortion on request is available in the PRC [People's Republic of China], but that forced abortions were not sanctioned by the Chinese government, and the likelihood of this occurring was low."
Hopefully he's got someone working on a new report.

To: Part 5

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.