Hayward: Communist Commentator Celebrates Abortion ‘Rights’ in China, North Korea, USSR

Leftist commentator Danny Haiphong, who contributes to Chinese state media outlets, touted on Sunday the easy availability of abortions in China and other authoritarian nations, including the psychotic dictatorship of North Korea, as evidence of their superiority over the United States.

Haiphong chose quite a murderer’s row of regimes to argue that the U.S. has a morally inferior view of abortion: the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, North Korea (the DPRK), and Cuba. 

He then argued that capitalists are somehow behind the “assault on abortion rights,” as though abortion were not an extremely lucrative industry that spends a gigantic amount of money influencing American politics to protect its interests:

The right to an abortion was first codified by the Soviet Union.

Abortion is legal in China, Vietnam, and the DPRK.

Abortion is also legal in Cuba.

Perhaps it's time to drop the anti-communism. The assault on abortion rights is being carried out by capitalists.

— Danny Haiphong (@SpiritofHo) June 26, 2022

Haiphong, an energetic defender of Chinese authoritarianism who has recently published with state media outlets like CGTN and the Global Times, was following the lead set by regime operatives like former Global Times editor Hu Xijin.  

The grotesquerie of a regime that forced its citizens to get abortions in the very recent past, and is still using forced abortion and sterilization to wipe out inconvenient racial minorities, is not easy to stomach. In China, a “woman’s right to choose” meant choosing to spend the rest of her life in prison if she did not abort her child as the State ordered.

Abortion was “liberalized” by these brutally repressive regimes because they view their citizens as problems to be minimized by keeping their numbers down. It is difficult to imagine a less convincing argument for abortion than saluting the infanticidal tendencies of governments like North Korea that routinely butcher their adult citizens. It’s not much of a sales pitch for communism to spotlight its tendency to treat human life as disposable.

Communist apologists might also think long and hard before trotting out Vietnam as a model since it boasts abortion rates so high that local officials are visibly disturbed by it, abortions tend to be unsafe, women who seek them are mistreated, and the general lack of support for pregnant women is appalling.