Joe Biden said in a speech in China while serving as vice president that he “fully understands” and was not “second-guessing” the communist regime’s brutal one-child policy, which resulted in the killing of hundreds of millions of children, mostly girls.
Biden made the comments – as documented in the Obama White House digital archives and reported by Fox News and the Washington Examiner on Twitter – while speaking at Sichuan University in 2012.
“But as I was talking to some of your leaders, you share a similar concern here in China,” Biden said. “You have no safety net. Your policy has been one which I fully understand – I’m not second-guessing – of one child per family. The result being that you’re in a position where one wage earner will be taking care of four retired people. Not sustainable.”
“So hopefully we can act in a way on a problem that’s much less severe than yours, and maybe we can learn together from how we can do that,” Biden said.
In 1979, China made it illegal for couples to bear more than one child in their lifetimes, attempting to curb population growth while striving for industrialization. Women who became pregnant a second time were forced to abort. If caught pregnant late in their term, the government would still kill their child. An estimated 400 million births were “prevented” between 1979 and 2015 when dictator Xi Jinping expanded the policy to allow two children in the wake of a precipitous decline in the national birth rate. “Prevented” includes abortions and infanticides, particularly of baby girls, as boys were more traditionally desirable for couples and those who had girls chose to kill them and try again for a boy. Many abandoned infants in open-air markets, where they would die and rot in public.
A feature in the Atlantic last year discussed the One Child Nation documentary, which includes interviews with an 84-year-old Chinese mid-wife, Huaru Yuan, who said she has performed “50,000 to 60,000 sterilizations and abortions.”
The Atlantic reported some of the gruesome details from the film:
As One Child Nation continues, the trail of horrors it depicts becomes long and winding. When China opened its doors to international adoption in 1992, many state-run orphanages became sites for human trafficking. Through her interviews, Wang learns about how newborns from families who violated the policy were kidnapped by family-planning officials and sold to orphanages, a detail that was repressed by the government (in the film, Wang speaks with a journalist who was eventually forced to flee to Hong Kong because of his reporting). To this day, many adoptees—and their families—find learning the truth about their origins nearly impossible.
A significant number of the babies sold were abandoned by their families or given to “matchmakers” for adoption. Many of the infants were girls given up by parents who hoped instead for a male child to carry on the family name. In one scene, Wang’s uncle recalls the loss of his newborn daughter, who was left on a meat counter in a market and died two days later when no one took her. Another of Wang’s relatives talks about how she gave away her own daughter to a human trafficker, fearing the child would die if abandoned.
A significant number of the babies sold were abandoned by their families or given to “matchmakers” for adoption. Many of the infants were girls given up by parents who hoped instead for a male child to carry on the family name. In one scene, Wang’s uncle recalls the loss of his newborn daughter, who was left on a meat counter in a market and died two days later when no one took her. Another of Wang’s relatives talks about how she gave away her own daughter to a human trafficker, fearing the child would die if abandoned.
China changed its one-child policy to a two-child policy in 2015. Forced abortions and infanticide continue, as detailed in the 2017 annual report of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), led by Sen. Marco Rubio and Rep. Chris Smith.
The Charlotte Lozier Institute reported on the revelations:
The report confirms that population planning regulations continue to exist at the provincial level that “instruct officials to carry out abortions, often referred to as ‘remedial measures’ (bujiu cuoshi), for ‘out-of-plan’ pregnancies.” The report cites family planning regulations from Jiangxi and Hubei provinces and the Shenzhen municipality.
Also noted are official reports from local government authorities which state that women are compelled to undergo the “four procedures” which are IUD insertion, sterilization, first trimester abortion, and mid- to late-term abortion. This is cited for the following: Gu County, Guichi District, Yunyang District, Wolong District, and Dongshahe Township.
Other reports have found this same abuse. The State Department’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2016 also found that coerced abortions continue to take place under China’s revised Population and Family Planning Law. The law states that a citizen’s “lawful rights” should not be violated in enforcing the family planning policy, yet the State Department’s report indicates that these rights are not clearly specified in the law. Also, there are seven activities listed in the law which are prohibited when officials implement the birth limit, and forced abortion is not one of them. The report notes there are regulations in Hunan, Hubei, and Liaoning provinces which require women to terminate pregnancies not in compliance with the law and confirms that these regulations have been enforced.
Reggie Littlejohn, founder and president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, spoke about China’s two-child policy in an interview in 2017:
Yes, China is not the only place where gendercide happens. But there are things that are unique to China. The main one is the coercive population control. For decades, there’s been the One-Child Policy. Now China has modified its policy from a One-Child Policy to a Two-Child Policy, but the way the Chinese government announced that was very misleading. They stated that they had “abandoned” the One-Child Policy. The mainstream media really picked up on that word, and now people think that all coercive population control in China is over, and that’s not true. They just switched it from a One-Child Policy to a Two-Child Policy.
So that now every couple in China is allowed to have two children. What does that mean? That means that the entire infrastructure of surveillance and coercion are still there. Women are still having quarterly pregnancy checks to make sure that they’re not illegally pregnant. They can still require a waiting period between the first child and the second child. And if you get pregnant during the waiting period, you can still be subject to forced abortion. Children can still be forcibly aborted. We had some cases that came out of China last year, 2016, where women were subject to forced abortion of third children. So coercion is continuing under the Two-Child Policy.
At the recent Democratic National Convention, the pro-abortion stance of the party — even up to the time of birth — was not a talking point, although abortion is still a part of the party platform.
Follow Penny Starr on Twitter.
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