This essay has a total of 2392 words and 9 pages.
Bye Bye BirdieA Holocaust of the Children
If the United States government implemented a law that told couples they could only have one child, how soon would a protest be in place? The answer is immediately, because it is not the government’s place to restrict the reproductive rights of any human being. However, this atrocity is taking place in China at this very moment. This law is known as the one-child law.
This policy was introduced by Chairman Mao to help ensure that the flood prone, famine-ridden China could feed its people by reducing its population (China Steps Up). The one-child policy essentially states that couples living in the cities may only have one-child, unless one or both of the couples are from an ethnic minority, or they are both only children, in which case they my have two. In most rural areas a couple my have a second child after a break of seven to ten years. These exceptions are allowed in order to keep the population from having a dramatic recession (China Steps Up).
Those who live within the city and have more than one child must abide by the extra birth policy, which requires that the couple must pay an extra tax for the apparent burden they impose on society, because they will use more of communist China’s public resources, which is said to be unfair to those who follow the one-child law (No Relaxation). The regulations also prohibit single women who become pregnant from giving birth (China’s “One Child” Policy Coercive). According to the Chinese government “The one child policy has proven, overall, to be successful in having kept approximately two hundred and fifty million births from happening since 1979,” (China Steps Up) however, at what cost does this so called success take place?
One of the most noticeable problems with the one child law is the ratio of men to women; there are approximately one hundred and fifty two males for every one hundred females, all in all that’s about sixty million more men than women (China Steps Up). China’s fertility rate, statistically, is 1.8, which is greater than Germany’s 1.2, but below that of the United States’ 2.1 (China’s One Child Rule). The unbalanced ratio is caused by two factors, the first being that there are naturally one hundred and five males born from every one hundred females. The second, because there has been a growing amount of disdain toward female babies, ever since the one-child law went into effect, the couples figure that if they can only have one child it had better be a boy. In Chinese culture the eldest son is to look after the ageing parents, however, if the Chinese couples can only have one child, that child had better be a boy or they will have no one to care for them as they age (China’s “One-Child” Policy Coercive). This often causes couples to abort their baby completely based on gender. Often times if a couple does give birth to a girl they will leave the infant at an orphanage where they will be most likely placed in what is known as a dying room. (China’s One Child Rule).
A documentary was made in 1995 called The Dying Rooms, produced by Kate Blewett. In this documentary one sees an infant girl named Mei-ming, or “no name” in English, who is “tied up in urine soaked blankets, scabs of dried mucus growing across her eyes, her face shrinking to a skull, malnutrition slowly shriveling her two year old body.” (Hilditch). This little girl, Mei-ming, died four days later from sheer neglect after her dying cries had been captured on film. To make things worse, the same treatment happens to almost every girl who enters an orphanage. Approximately fifteen million female babies have disappeared from China’s demographic records since the one-child law went into effect in 1976. It is estimated that ninety percent of the fifty to sixty female babies admitted each month to the Nanning Orphanage in the Guangxi region, where Mei-ming was filmed, will end their lives there within two to three years. One will never find a male child in one of these orphanages unless he is disabled, either physically or mentally, in which case they are treated the same as the female children, with complete neglect. As stated by Kate Blewett, “I did not know human beings could treat children with such contempt, such cruelty. Some of the orphanages we visited were little more than death camps. No child should suffer the kind of neglect we filmed.” (Hilditch).
Another issue that has become an increasing problem in China due to the one-child law is forced abortions. The top three forms of birth control used in China are intrauterine devices, often referred to as IUD’s, sterilization, and abortions (China’s “One -Child” Policy). According to author Steven W. Mosher, “coerced abortions, sometimes just days before the baby is due, are now commonplace, as are reports of enforced sterilization, and of hospitals fatally injecting second babies shortly after their birth.” (Hilditch). This is a major problem in large cities, the local government officials and family planning workers will force women to have abortions through any means necessary. Many times they will arrest pregnant women and tell them they can either have an abortion or pay an unreasonably high amount of money for their release; most women end up having the abortion. Often to avoid the family planning and government workers, couples will send the pregnant women to stay with relatives until she gives birth, or they will claim that their newborn belongs to a friend or relative (China Steps Up). In the past year, in the city of Shandong, more than one hundred twenty thousand women were forced to have abortions by the local government (Pocha).
One reported story of the forced abortions happened to a couple in their forties, a woman Zhu Hong Ying and her husband Xia Jian Dong; they had one son already and were expecting a second. The family had returned home from a family outing one day and the people from the family planning department were waiting for them to arrive. They forced the seven months pregnant woman into a van and took her to the local family planning clinic where they demanded seven hundred RMB, which is about ninety dollars in American money. This may not seem like very much to us, but that was two months wages for Zhu Hong Ying’s husband (Pocha).
According to Zhu Hong Ying, when she was unable to give them the seven hundred RMB, a group of eight people surrounded her and harangued her to have an abortion (Pocha). “I just kept sobbing and begging, but no one listened,” Zhu Hong Ying said. “Finally, I was so weak I just said ‘yes.’ Then a doctor came in and gave me an injection in the stomach. The whole day I didn’t feel anything. The second day, in the early morning, blood and water all flowed out of me. Then the baby came out, but it was dead. It was a boy.” Zhu Hong Ying said that gazing at her dead son was the most heart breaking moment of her life. However, she had no time to grieve; within minutes a nurse came in with a black plastic garbage bag and told her to dispose of the corpse in the la
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