China Takes a Break from Genocidal Forced Sterilization to Worry About Women’s Rights in U.S.

The Chinese government-run newspaper Global Times expressed concern Wednesday over the potential reversal of Roe v. Wade in America — responding to this week’s leak of a draft Supreme Court decision — claiming such a move would indicate America is choosing a path of “regression and ignorance.”

The leak, published in the American outlet Politico, was a draft opinion by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito concluding that “a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions.” If adopted — which the Court has since emphatically stated is not a foregone conclusion — individual American states would once again receive the right to dictate their own laws on ending the lives of children in the womb.

China, arguably the world’s worst human rights abuser, has used abortions and infanticide for decades to oppress political dissidents and contain the growth of ethnic minority populations. International human rights experts have concluded that China’s “family planning” policies constitute genocide.

The Chinese Communist Party proudly boasts its “one-child policy” killed 400 million people, not counting mothers dying in forced abortions, while it was in place. It continues to promote the concept of improving “population quality” and has since launched a mass campaign of forced abortions, sterilization, and infanticide against the Uyghur people of East Turkistan, which international experts have concluded constitutes genocide.

The Global Times did not address any of China’s women’s rights realities in its commentary Wednesday, in which it presented itself as flabbergasted that Americans are debating the legality of abortion. Free debates and expressions of political disagreement are a crime in China known as “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.”

“Unbelievably, freedom of abortion suddenly became a topic of fierce debate in US society in 2022,” the Times proclaimed. “The [Politico] report ignited discussion on whether Washington will take this astonishing backward step for women’s rights and triggered emerging protests across the country.”

“If Roe v. Wade is eventually overturned, the nearly 50-year legal abortion rights in the US will crumble, and the US’ history of progress in defending women’s rights will be reversed,” the Chinese outlet predicted. “Unfortunately, US political forces do not care. All they are concerned about is whether the issue would bring them benefits, regardless of the fact that their increasingly radical stances may trigger deeper and bitterer divisions in American society.”

“More importantly, when bringing discussions about abortion half century ago back to the spotlight again, the US is displaying to the world that it may be stepping on the path of heading toward regression and ignorance amid the fierce political infighting,” it continued, citing a regime-approved “expert” identified as Professor Xu Liang. “Be it gun control or abortion, liberals and conservatives are pushing their respective agendas to the extreme, which could more and more deform US society, Lü said.”

Xu described the reversal of Roe v. Wade as a potential “atomic bomb into U.S. society … creating another Black Lives Matter movement.”

Despite its ongoing genocide against Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz people, and other ethnic minorities, and its years of documented racist policies against black people, the Chinese government has embraced the American “Black Lives Matter” movement and used it as a cudgel to attack the legitimacy of the United States on the world stage.

“The challenges facing the United States in human rights are deep-seated. They did not just emerge over the past four years, such as ‘Black Lives Matter.’ It did not come up only recently,” Chinese Communist Party Politburo member Yang Jiechi exclaimed in a 16-minute rant during a meeting with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan in Alaska last year.

Elsewhere in Chinese state media, the government Xinhua News Agency speculated the Supreme Court leak “could energize” the Democrat Party, citing regime-approved experts to describe the potential reversal of Roe as “the loss of [women’s] individual rights.”

Individual rights do not exist in China. The Communist Party strictly controls nearly every aspect of individual life through its “social credit system,” which ascribes a numerical value to each person based on their loyalty and usefulness to the Party. The Communist Party has especially denied women their reproductive rights. Under its brutal “one-child policy,” state doctors killed children in the womb, sometimes very late in pregnancies, when a woman was found to be “illegally” pregnant with a second child. The practice persists even though China expanded the policy to three children in 2021.

The “one-child policy” has created a dramatic discrepancy between the number of men and women in China; China is estimated to be home to 35 million more men than women, as Chinese parents on the aggregate preferred discarding girls and keeping boys. The abundance of men has led to a birth rate collapse, as China lacks a sustainable population of women of child-bearing age. The Communist Party responded to this by announcing in 2021 that it would begin curbing approvals for “non-medical” abortions and making it legal for Han couples to have up to three children.

In February, the Wall Street Journal reported that it had obtained a government plan for a “campaign of intervention” to prevent abortions and “reshape the parenting culture of multichild families.”

“In 1991, a time of some of the most brutal enforcement methods of the one-child policy, around 14 million abortions were performed in China, according to National Health Commission data. The number was just below nine million in 2020,” the Journal observed.

The promotion of childbirth is limited to ethnic Han people, the majority of the population of China in the east. In western China, the Communist Party actively uses abortion and sterilization to limit the population of Muslim-majority ethnic groups, which dominate in East Turkistan.

The Uyghur Tribunal, an independent coalition of human rights and international law experts, found China guilty of genocide against Uyghurs “beyond a reasonable doubt” last year. The use of abortion and sterilization proved a pivotal cornerstone to coming to that conclusion.

“Pregnant women, in detention centres and outside, were forced to have abortions even at the very last stages of pregnancy. In the course of attempted abortions babies were sometimes born alive but then killed,” the Uyghur Tribunal judgment read. “A systematic programme of birth control measures had been established forcing women to endure removal against their will of wombs and to undergo effective sterilization by means of IUDs that were only removeable by surgical means.”

The definition of genocide, as per the United Nations, includes “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”

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