{"id":2214,"date":"2016-05-15T04:45:22","date_gmt":"2016-05-15T04:45:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org\/blog\/?p=2214"},"modified":"2019-03-28T02:54:27","modified_gmt":"2019-03-28T02:54:27","slug":"why-many-women-in-china-didnt-celebrate-mothers-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org\/blog\/why-many-women-in-china-didnt-celebrate-mothers-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Why many women in China didn’t celebrate Mother’s Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

Re-published with the permission of the Catholic News Agency (link below)<\/em><\/p>\n

May 8, 2016.\u00a0 Mothers across the globe are celebrating Mother\u2019s Day today with their husbands and children. But for many women in China, Mother\u2019s Day is a haunting reminder of the cost of their country\u2019s harsh reproductive laws.<\/p>\n

While abortion rates in China have in the past been numbered at 13 million per year,\u00a0according to the State Department\u2019s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2015, the real number is almost double.<\/p>\n

According to the report, released April 12,\u00a0the number of annual abortions in China is\u00a0actually 10 million higher than previously thought, bringing the total number of annual abortions to a staggering 23 million a year, with no specification on how many of them are forced.<\/p>\n

The reason for the increase, according to the report, is that the 13 million covers only the number of abortions in official, government facilities, whereas the additional 10 million were reported by an official Chinese news outlet for non-governmental facilities.<\/p>\n

The report states that \u201cthe National Health Population and Family Planning Commission reported that 13 million women annually terminated unplanned pregnancies.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAn official news media outlet also reported at least an additional 10 million chemically induced abortions were performed in nongovernment facilities,\u201d the report read, stating that \u201cGovernment statistics on the percentage of all abortions that were non-elective was not available.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Reggie<\/a>

Reggie Littlejohn and Anni\u00a0 in Yosemite, 2015.<\/p><\/div>\n

Zhang Anni is a classic example of the nightmare that China\u2019s restrictive birth policy forces on countless women, as well as the hope and promise that is lost daily to forced abortions and gendercide in the country.<\/p>\n

The second daughter of Chinese dissident and human rights activist Zhang Lin, Anni, 13, was nearly forcibly aborted numerous times when her mother was just six months pregnant.<\/p>\n

Her family had been persecuted relentlessly for her father\u2019s writings and activism against the Chinese Communist Party, to the extent that he was jailed numerous times and tortured with cruel punishments, such as jumping on his back, hands and feet, resulting in injuries that put him in a wheelchair.<\/p>\n

Since Anni was Zhang Lin\u2019s second child at a time when it was still illegal to have two children under the Communist Party\u2019s strict One-Child Policy, her mother was targeted for forced abortion, with family planning police showing up and pounding on their door daily to drag her out for an abortion.<\/p>\n

Anni\u2019s mother was so distressed that she contemplated suicide, but fought against the idea in order to protect her daughter\u2019s life.<\/p>\n

In the end, Zhan Lin was able to save Anni from being aborted by convincing the family planning police that she was the first child of his second wife. However, his constant blogging about the brutal pressure being placed on his family also put the government in a bad light, so they decided to back off.<\/p>\n

But that wasn\u2019t the end. At 10 years old Anni became the youngest person in China to be detained in prison. She was arrested after school due to her father\u2019s activism and kept overnight without food or a blanket, and was released the next day only after hours of haggling on the part of her father to get her out.<\/p>\n

Given the precariousness of the situation and knowing he would likely go back to prison, Zhang Lin wanted to get Anni out of China, and contacted women\u2019s rights activist Reggie Littlejohn for help.<\/p>\n

President and founder of Women\u2019s Rights Without Frontiers, an organization dedicated to fighting forced abortion and gendercide in China, Littlejohn and her husband agreed to take in both Anni and her older sister Ruli. Four people were jailed for helping them to get out of the country.<\/p>\n

Now, after just two and a half years in the United States, Anni has gone from speaking no English to getting straight-A\u2019s and is one of the top students in her class. She began piano lessons shortly after arriving to the U.S., and recently won a competition to play in New York\u2019s prestigious Carnegie Hall.<\/p>\n

Littlejohn, who has taken on full parental responsibilities for Ruli and Anni, told CNA May 4 that to her, Anni is \u201can example.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a second daughter, girls like that are commonly aborted due to gendercide. And also her mother was almost forcibly aborted\u2026her mother was so distressed about this that she actually contemplated suicide, it just tore her apart,\u201d Littlejohn said.<\/p>\n

However,\u00a0she said that\u00a0when she looks at Anni, who she considers as her own daughter, \u201cI think of how beautiful and how brilliant she is and this is the kind of talent and beauty and light and love and joy that are being lost through forced abortion and sex-selective abortion in China every day.\u201d<\/p>\n

While many might believe that these practices have stopped with China\u2019s recent implementation of a two-child policy, which went into effect Jan. 1, Littlejohn says this is far from being true.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe new Two-Child Policy is nothing to celebrate about. They used to kill every child after one, now they kill every child after two. So the entire infrastructure of coercion is still in place,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou still have to have government permission to have two children. It\u2019s two children per couple, so if you\u2019re not in a couple, you can\u2019t have a kid. So single women are still forcibly aborted in China and that accounts for a very large proportion of the abortions,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n

The State Department\u2019s report also indicated a system of coercion surrounding reproductive rights in China, reporting that \u201cthe country\u2019s birth-limitation policies retained harshly coercive elements in law and practice.\u201d<\/p>\n

The report spoke of the \u201cintense pressure\u201d put on families by the police to enforce birth quotas, resulting in \u201cinstances of local family-planning officials using physical coercion to meet government goals.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSuch practices included the mandatory use of birth control and the forced abortion of unauthorized pregnancies,\u201d it read, noting that in cases in which the family already had two children, \u201cone parent was often required to undergo sterilization.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are even links between job promotion and success in meeting the birth limitations. Police job promotion, in particular, \u201cprovided a powerful structural incentive for officials to employ coercive measures to meet population goals.\u201d<\/p>\n

While officially prohibited in China, sex-selective abortions \u201ccontinued because of traditional preference for male children and the birth-limitation policy,\u201d the report stated.<\/p>\n

\u201cFemale infanticide, gender-biased abortions, and the abandonment and neglect of baby girls remained problems due to the traditional preference for sons and the birth-limitation policy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Littlejohn said she doesn\u2019t expect the number of gendercide abortions to go down even under the two-child policy, because when a family has a daughter for their first child, \u201cit\u2019s routine to abort or abandon\u201d a second daughter so that the family can reserve the place for a boy.<\/p>\n

She said she has been discouraged that the amount of international pressure to stop these atrocities from happening in China have dropped after the country\u2019s leaders changed the rules on the one-child policy.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Chinese Communist Party propaganda machine announced this change as the abandonment of the One-Child Policy and the western media just picked up on it. So people think that the problem of forced abortion and sex-selective abortion is over,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

However, if the State Department\u2019s 2015 report is any indication, this is a trend that won\u2019t end any time soon.<\/p>\n

Littlejohn said that as time goes on, she expects more cases of forced abortions to leak out of China, making it obvious that the problem still exists. However, getting new cases isn\u2019t easy due to the trauma and persecution women face if they decide to speak out.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf a woman is forcibly aborted\u2026she\u2019s been completely traumatized, she\u2019s lost her child and she has suffered extreme sexual violence, basically. I equate forced abortion with official government rape,\u201d Littlejohn said.<\/p>\n

Then if the woman lets news of her forced abortion leak to western media, \u201cshe and her family are going to be intensely and heavily persecuted, to add onto all the trauma.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFor every woman who will step forward and say \u2018this happened to me,\u2019 there are a thousand or a million that are going to be silent because they do not want to endure the persecution of themselves and their families on top of the forced abortion and the loss of a child that they\u2019ve already suffered,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

In order to help draw attention to the situation Littlejohn urged people to watch a brief, 4 minute video her organization produced called \u201cStop Forced Abortion: China\u2019s War Against Women\u201d in order be informed, and encouraged donations to their \u201cSave a Girl Campaign.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re in one little area of China, but if we had resources we could be saving girls all over China. Every little girl who is vulnerable to sex-selective abortion deserves to be saved.\u201d<\/p>\n

Learn more about Women’s Rights Without Frontiers “Save a Girl” Campaign here:
\nhttp:\/\/womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org\/index.php?nav=give<\/p>\n

Read original article written by Elise Harris here:\u00a0http:\/\/www.catholicnewsagency.com\/news\/why-many-women-in-china-wont-celebrate-mothers-day-96721\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Re-published with the permission of the Catholic News Agency (link below) May 8, 2016.\u00a0 Mothers across the globe are celebrating Mother\u2019s Day today with their husbands and children. But for many women in China, Mother\u2019s Day is a haunting reminder … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[7,15,8,20,124,128,109,1,55,136,138,139],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-forced-abortion","category-gendercide","category-one-child-policy","category-reggie-littlejohn","category-save-a-girl","category-sex-selective-abortion","category-steven-mosher","category-uncategorized","category-womens-rights-without-frontiers","category-yang-yuzhi","category-zhang-anni","category-zhang-lin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2214"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2214\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2826,"href":"https:\/\/www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2214\/revisions\/2826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}