One Child = Selective Abortion, Female Infanticide, Abandoning Baby Girls

Hat tip to All Girls Allowed via the lovely and talented Mrs Wright at Dreams of Arhyelon. The following article is from the China Post:

China to ban ‘nasty’ family planning slogans

SHANGHAI — China is ordering local officials to stop using threatening slogans to enforce its strict “one-child” policy, state media has reported.

The government wants to ban slogans like: “Kill all your family members if you don’t follow the rule” and “We would rather scrape your womb than allow you to have a second child,” the Shanghai Daily said at the weekend.

China, the world’s most populous country with more than 1.3 billion people, introduced the “one-child” policy in 1979.

Despite calls for relaxation, Chinese officials say the policy is still needed, claiming over-population threatens the country’s development.

But the National Population and Family Planning Commission aims to prevent zealous local authorities from offending the public or worsening social tensions with “nasty” slogans, the newspaper said.

Several referred to forced sterilization — one slogan said: “If you don’t have your tubes tied, your house will be demolished.”

“Once you are captured, your tubes will be tied. Should you escape, we’ll hunt you down. If you attempt suicide, we’ll offer you either the rope or a bottle of poison,” read another.

The newspaper gave no indication of where the slogans were used.

China, under a 1980 policy designed to control its population, permits most couples to have only one child, an approach critics charge is backed with forced sterilizations and abortions.

Some experts say the “one-child” policy has turned into a demographic time bomb as the population ages, storing up huge economic and social problems for the country as well as fostering a gender imbalance.

Given the traditional preference for sons, sex-specific abortions occur and female infanticide and the abandoning of baby girls have also been reported. [emphasis mine]

New slogans which have received the government’s nod of approval include: “Caring for a girl means caring for the future of the nation,” the newspaper said, in an effort to encourage families to raise daughters.

My comment: knowing that an evil exists and actually seeing and feeling it are two different things, as different as book-learning from life-experience. While in China, I spoke with my friendly and intelligent tour guide, and he explained how, when he went to go get his marriage license, the workings of the One Child Policy were revealed to him: he was ushered into a back room with a wrinkled gray old granny, who told him he must take a sacred oath to support the policy, in writing, and he would be denied both government work and his government run health care forever after if he broke his word.

Since, at that time, both he and his wife were living in government run dormitories, and only meeting on the weekends, it was no great hardship. Later, when the dorms were privatized and sold (as part of China’s ongoing but doomed attempt to reap the benefits of a free market without having a free society)  he moved in with his wife. In the course of time, they applied for permission to have a child: but the old granny in the back room told him that the quota for that district was filled for that year, and they could apply for permission next year. In his innocence, he asked what he and his wife were to do in the meanwhile. Granny, speaking on behalf of the dictatorship of the proletariat, told him he should send his wife back home to live with her mother, so that he would not be tempted during the year intervening.

In due course of time, he had a little girl, which means his family name will not be carried on. He himself, being the only child and the son of an only child, had neither uncles nor cousins nor any of the family relationships which figure so predominantly in the writings of Confucius. He expressed sorrow that his daughter had no siblings to play with.

Since this was a tour guide who works every day with Americans and Europeans visiting to adopt Chinese children, I asked him why the Chinese cannot adopt the Chinese, to spare the children the effort, at least, of learning a new language? He just shook his head and explained the law did not allow.

I have since heard that the number of girls put up for adoption, girls like my own daughter, have dropped significantly, now that ultrasound technology allows the couple to know the sex of the child before birth, and kill the child in the womb if she is a girl. The feminists who urge the killing of children in the womb is rightful and liberating for females do not extend their concern to unborn females.

I was appalled beyond words. I had read many a science fiction dystopia where humans are treated like ants in an ant farm. Seeing a man who was forbidden by the state from having sexual relations with his own wife is a different matter.

An epilogue: I was once invited to the house of a prominent science fiction author. One of the guests there, when the topic came up, expressed his approval of the One Child Policy of China. I regret not punching him in the face hard enough to knock him down, and to this day think of myself as less than a man for allowing such a thing to be said to me unchallenged. I tell myself that peacefulness is civilized, nay, divine, but I fear it was merely cravenness.

What is to be done? The pro-aborts cannot be reasoned with. Or do you think someone willing to inveigle a  mother to kill her own precious baby is so honest and honorable that when shown logical reasons why his entire ideology supporting a zillion-dollar-a-year baby-killing industry offends natural morality, he will repent?