All Girls Allowed - in protest of China's 'gendercide'

[devilsadvocate]

I just recently found out about this organization and thought that since most here are interested in women's rights that it might be worth mentioning here:

http://www.allgirlsallowed.org

It was founded by a woman who was involved in the Tiananman Square protests originally and is now trying to stop the practices of forced abortion due to the one child policy and infanticide of unwanted baby girls in China. Although the founder does profess Christian beliefs, I don't see any evidence that her views are fundamentalist going by some of her comments in interviews, not to mention the very fact that her focus seems to be on emphasizing the value of females in society. I would think that a project like this is something that both fundies and non-fundies could get behind. I don't think most people want to see baby girls dying.

Here is an article about the founder: http://articles.boston.com/2011-08-31/l ... -tiananmen

Chai Ling learned a thing or two about leadership as a student in Beijing. At 23, she was commander in chief of the 1989 Tiananmen prodemocracy movement.

Declared one of China’s 21 most wanted students following the bloody military crackdown - she was fourth on the list - Ling fled to the United States in 1990, graduated from Princeton and Harvard, and emerged as the head of a Boston software company and a wife and mother.

She has never returned to China. But now, at 45, she’s taking on the People’s Republic once again.

Ling has started a nonprofit organization called All Girls Allowed, which aims to challenge China’s 31-year-old policy of allowing each family to have only one child. The policy has led to sterilizations and, because of a traditional Chinese preference for boys, abortions to reduce the number of girls born. The Chinese government has denied that it forces women to be sterilized or have abortions.

Ling’s zeal for improving the plight of Chinese woman and girls, fueled by a recent conversion to Christianity, aims to end such gendercide in China, which she likens to “a Tiananmen massacre taking place every hour.’’

“My fight for China started long ago at Tiananmen Square,’’ Ling stated at a celebration marking the group’s first anniversary in June. “Ever since there has been planted in me a desire to see China know true freedom,’’ said Ling, the mother of three girls.

Her new cause may be as much an uphill battle as the 1989 prodemocracy movement. Blacklisted by the Chinese government, she’s now being an activist long distance, with a nine-person staff and offices in Boston and New York.

China’s One Child Policy is a hot-button issue in the West. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has condemned forced abortion and sterilizations in China. A congressional Human Rights Commission held a hearing on the policy in 2009, raising the issue’s visibility.

But opposition to the one-child policy has been most vocal from humanitarian and Christian antiabortion groups that say the practice of aborting female fetuses to ensure that a family’s lone child is a son is leading to other human rights violations. These include the abandonment of baby girls; a high rate of female suicide (approximately 500 suicides a day, according to the World Health Organization); and kidnapping and trafficking of girls who are in high demand as child brides due to a shortage of girls in China.

The One-Child Policy is “China’s war on women and girls,’’ according to Reggie Littlejohn, a California attorney who founded Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, an international coalition trying to stop forced abortion and sexual slavery in China.

[debrand]

Does China really have forced abortions? I ask because I was never certain if that was a myth or reality.

[kb2]

Does China really have forced abortions? I ask because I was never certain if that was a myth or reality.

I always wanted to know this too.

[deepasducks]

Re forced abortion, I don't have sources to hand, but my understanding is that it depends a lot on the region. At various times, there might have been a quota for reducing the fertility of a given region, or keeping it under a particular level. Whoever was in charge of that would have to find a way to make it happen. So in one region parents might be able to just pay a fine and have more than the allowed children, but in another region women might have to report for regular pregnancy tests to make sure they are not pregnant, and be required to have an abortion if they are. I don't think there is really a consistent policy throughout the country about how the one-child rule is enforced or how strictly, but I have definitely read accounts of administrators and individuals going to extreme and inhumane lengths to comply with the rule.

[treemom]

Forced abortions up are allowed, but coerced abortions is a totally different bird.

[gardenvarietycitizen]

Like others said, it depends on the region and also on the time period, also you have to remember that the reporting on it can vary pretty widely depending on the aims of the piece. A LOT has changed in day to day life since 1989.

That said, last week when I went on the adoption-blog binge I found several links explaining that the situation for girls in China has actually greatly improved lately, and so a lot of the people who were holding the old stereotypes and expecting to find hordes of abandoned healthy baby girls in China are finding it not to be so anymore.

Partly it's due to increasing appreciation for girls (due to various efforts including explicit government campaigns about the value of girls), partly it's due to VOLUNTARY abortions by sex for those who still don't want girls (so rather than an abandoned baby, some people who might otherwise have abandoned a girl will just abort at the time the sex of the fetus is determined) and an increase in local adoptions particularly after the Sichuan earthquake, there was a lot of coverage of the orphans there and a "boom" of adoption inside China, of sorts.

This was on adoption forums so the discussion then went on to what that meant for the supply of non-special-needs orphans, there's a "shortage" (relative to foreign demand) and wow does that spawn off plenty of discussion.

So I guess, I dunno about abortion for population control reasons (like I said, enforcement of population controls varied anyway, there were places that allowed big families even before) but the abortion for gender selection thing probably isn't something the government has full control over even when it happens. I can see how insisting on a one-child policy would help that along (but it's not direct) and apparently those policies are being relaxed too, so there's room for a girl and boy. Absolutely the line between force and coercion can be blurry, though.

I have to wonder though also what the stats are for sex-selection abortions in the US. With ultrasounds so common and it seems everyone wants to be told the sex of the kid, I wouldn't be surprised to find people doing it in the US either (and there's articles on the practice in India, which doesn't have the population control rules, it's just voluntary).

[emmiedahl]

It's good to be aware, but the US is hardly a nation in which we can point fingers about reproductive choice.

Women need to be free to make their own reproductive choices; free from force and coercion, whether that comes from asshole husbands, government policies, or people screaming on the sidewalks in front of abortion clinics. Do we have that liberty here and I missed it? Not to downplay the seriousness of what is being reported, but Americans are living in a huge glass house here.

[FaustianSlip]

The sterilization/abortion thing depends heavily on what province you're in. I will say that while Fujian is overwhemingly represented in the number of people who gain asylum in the U.S. each year under the one child policy (a U.S. asylum policy enacted during the first Bush administration allows any Chinese person, male, female, old, young, whoever, to make a claim for asylum based on oppression under the one child policy), Fujian province actually has one of the most lax implementations of that policy anywhere in China. It's not at all uncommon to encounter Fujianese people- people who have been having kids since the one child thing was enacted- with two, three, four kids. Also, people can have more than one child here, but you have to pay a fee for kids after your first. The amount of the fee varies depending on where you live. But I've met plenty of folks with more than one kid- either they go to Hong Kong or Macau and have the kid or pay the fee.

Additionally, China has banned sex-selective abortions and theoretically, when someone now goes to have an abortion, it's illegal for the techs to tell the person whether the child is a boy or a girl. Ditto ultrasounds- techs aren't allowed to tell the parents what gender they're expecting. That isn't to say that it doesn't happen if someone is willing to pony up enough of a bribe, but it's not supposed to. If the U.S. was so serious about stopping gender selection in China, maybe we should stop issuing tourist visas to rich Chinese people who are going to the U.S. for "IVF," which really boils down to, "We want a boy enough to implant several eggs and keep the one that's male." Though would it be preferable for a female child to be born to a couple that don't want her? I don't know.

Frankly, I find India way more problematic in the sense that there's zero safety valve for girls there. At least in China, there is the possibility of adoption, even though the Chinese have dialed that back a lot (I suspect out of embarrassment that the whole world knows that if you want to adopt a baby girl, this is the place to come), but India won't allow people to adopt unless they're Indian, so you get girls who are literally named "unwanted" and/or put out like trash. I'm not saying forced abortions are desirable at all, but I think girls have it a hell of a lot better here in China, based on what I've seen, than they do in India. I also agree with Emmiedahl that when you look at our own reproductive options in the U.S., there are enough people who would make the U.S. just like China but in reverse, chaining women to beds and forcing them to have abortions if they were given the chance, that it's sort of laughable for us to talk. Neither scenario is a good one.

[Austin]

It's good to be aware, but the US is hardly a nation in which we can point fingers about reproductive choice.

Women need to be free to make their own reproductive choices; free from force and coercion, whether that comes from asshole husbands, government policies, or people screaming on the sidewalks in front of abortion clinics. Do we have that liberty here and I missed it? Not to downplay the seriousness of what is being reported, but Americans are living in a huge glass house here.

ITA.

[MadameX]

Another problem facing rural Chinese girls in the wake of the one-child policy that so favors boys is kidnapping. There aren't enough brides to go around. There was a really eye-opening documentary a few years ago that focused on many aspects of the policy, one of them being this kidnapping phenomenon. Richer families kidnap poor, rural girls to marry their sons. The girls' families hire PIs to track them down and bring them home.