Chai Ling was a leader of the Tiananmen Square protests. Now, however, she is not agitating for democracy, but for the end of China’s abusive One Child policy. (I’ll keep adding the “abusive”, although population control programs have always and everywhere been abusive. Sooner or later, someone decides he’d like to get a bonus, so he’ll just force “a few” women to have sterilizations, then everyone else has to keep up their sterilization numbers, and then… And we’ve done it in our country, too.)
Kathryn Lopez at Townhall wrote about Chai’s testimony on the One Child policy in Congress and in her book. It is heartbreaking:
That she was a victim of the one-child policy didn’t dawn on her until a 2009 [Congressional] hearing… In that hearing, a woman named Wujian talked about her forced abortion under the one-child policy. …
“I was not prepared for her testimony,” Chai writes in her book. “I felt the pain and helplessness of Tiananmen when the tanks moved in on us. I felt the pain and helplessness of that horrible afternoon on the operating table when they performed the abortion on me without anesthesia.” She felt a “deep-rooted sadness” for a baby she would abort while married, after leaving China, having been so accustomed to it as a routine option. …
Chai Ling did not even fully realize what she was protesting in Tiananmen Square in 1989, the pain of tyranny having oppressed her — body, mind, and soul — in such deep and abiding ways, as her book makes clear. As she said on Capitol Hill this September: “We are here to report and mourn the loss of 400-plus million lives taken” under China’s one-child policy. “But I never realized until I was writing my memoir that three of those babies are mine.”
Abortion is dehumanizing — and not just to the unborn child whose life it ends. It’s degrading to the entire family, to society and civilization as a whole.
Sadly, the comments on the online article bear out that assertion. While many wrote of their support for political action against China’s policies, one person wrote that the article was an “odd take” on the situation, since the only problem the poster saw was that Chai wasn’t free in her ”reproductive choices.” Because, as long as you “freely” chose it, murder is ok? (and she thought she was choosing this freely, at least her third abortion, so how free is free before it’s really free?)
Yet another person who didn’t read to the bottom before posting a comment, since the end of the article discusses the tendency of women to excuse those who pressured them into an abortion or failed to support them when they needed help.
Chai Ling’s book is A Heart for Freedom. I will try to get to reading it soon.
But probably not on the plane to China. I had a hard enough time biting my tongue last time in Tiananmen Square and in front of the guide (“Oh, Chinese don’t care much about abortion,” he dismissively told our adoption group. Really? Like the people who lynched the family planning officials last month, I wanted to say. They seemed to care…).
