China’s One Child Policy: Open Letter to Ted Turner — Challenge to Debate
Dear Mr. Turner,
As the founder and president of CNN and one of the most powerful people on earth, you are obligated to get your facts straight. You failed in this when you stated at the Cancun climate change conference on Sunday that the entire world should adopt a One Child Policy like that of China – which, you say, is voluntary. Your premise that the enforcement of China’s One Child Policy is not “draconian” is demonstrably false, and your viewers deserve the truth.
As president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, I was one of several One-Child Policy experts who testified before the United States Congressional Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission on November 10, 2009. You can find a dozen expert reports documenting coercion our website: www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org. Or, if you’d like to watch a short video called “Stop Forced Abortion – China’s War on Women,” click here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjtuBcJUsjY. In this video you will see the faces and hear the stories of women who have been forcibly aborted in China, one of whom died during a forced abortion at nine months. Compliance with the One Child Policy is anything but “voluntary.”
You admitted in 2009 that you were “not intimately familiar” with the One Child Policy, and you still have not done your homework. If you had read the Congressional testimony, you would have learned that China’s One-Child Policy causes more violence against women and girls than any other official policy on earth. The Chinese government controls women’s bodies through forced abortion, forced sterilization and infanticide.
When we say, “forced abortion,” what do we mean? At the Congressional Hearing, we heard the heart-wrenching testimony of “Wujian,” a victim of China’s One Child Policy. Wujian went into hiding when you became pregnant without a birth permit. The Family Planning Officials—China’s “Womb Police”—broke into her hiding place and dragged her out for a forced abortion. When the oxytocin injection failed to induce labor, they forced her onto an operating table and cut the nearly full term baby to pieces with scissors. The nurse told her that she was one of 10,000 forced abortion in her town that year.
More recently, an appalling video of a Chinese woman forced to undergo abortion at 8 months emerged in October. You can see it here. http://www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org/blog/. An Al-Jazeera reporter sneaked into a Chinese hospital to speak with the woman, and later her husband, waiting outside in a car. The film shows her with huge bruises on her arm. Her husband described the scene in which she was captured. “They held her arms behind her back, pushed her head against the door, kicked her stomach, and I don’t know whether they were trying to give her a miscarriage.” The footage shows the jail cell where she was held as they gave her 8 month unborn baby a lethal injection.
Is this the “voluntary” government control you so ignorantly advocate for all the women of the world?
You may not know that in China, because of the traditional preference for boys, sex-selective abortion is common and most of the aborted fetuses are girls, a form of “gendercide.” Are you aware that because of this gendercide, there are an estimated 30 million more men than women in China today? In turn, this gender imbalance is a major force driving sexual trafficking of women and girls in Asia.
Finally, did you know that China has the highest female suicide rate of any country in the world? Approximately 500 women a day end their lives in China, the only nation where the female suicide rate is higher for woman than for men. I believe that this abnormally high female suicide rate is related to China’s coercive family planning.
After a century of expanding women’s rights, it is shocking – indeed, frightening – that someone of your stature would advocate to globalize China’s One-Child Policy – a policy of systematic violence against women. If you disagree after reading this, I challenge you to a debate. You present the reasons that the world should adopt the One Child Policy, and I’ll present evidence that doing so would hurl women’s rights back to the dark ages. You owe it to your viewers to present both sides of an issue.
For those who want to sign a petition against forced abortion in China, click here: http://www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org/index.php?nav=sign_our_petition
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