“"I asked the doctor if it was a boy or girl, the doctor said it was a boy. My friends who were beside me said the baby's body was completely black. I felt desolate, so I didn't look up to see the baby…The nurses dealt with the body like it was rubbish," "They wrapped it up in a black plastic bag and threw it in the trash.”” -From a report by NPR (Lim, “Cases of Forced Abortions Surface in China”).
This is what a mother said when she was forced to abort her baby because of the one child policy in China.
Which is more valuable, resources or people? In China, today, the answer is resources.
Today, I will talk to you about China’s one child policy: resources they feared to lose, the lack of respect and how we should respond.
First I will talk about Chinas lack of resources.
Fitzpatrick wrote, in 1949, Mao Tse-tung was chairman of the People’s Republic of China and the country had a population of 550,000,000. Mao encouraged the Chinese people to have many children to strengthen the country. Later, after a civil war with Japan, and the great leap forward which is a revolution in which China focused on steel and not farming, there were famines that killed between 14 and 40 million people. But by the 1970’s, China’s population had grown so much that the country’s leaders were worried that there would not be enough resources to support so many people. Because of this a recommended maximum for the number of children per family was introduced. The maximum was two children in the city and three or four children in the rural areas. This did not do anything to decrease the population (Fitzpatrick, “A Brief History of China’s One Child Policy”).
According to Rosenberg the one-child-per-family policy was put into effect by Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping (Rosenberg, “China's One Child Policy”) after the recommended maximums failed, in 1980, in order to limit the population to 1.3 billion by the year 2000. Today, China has a population of about 1.2 billion.
Next, I will talk about how this policy caused a lack of respect for human life. According to G. William Skinner, an anthropologist and China specialist at the University of California-Davis, and Chinese researcher Yuan Jianhua (Lubman, “Infanticide detailed in China”) the policy has led to a huge increase of infanticide.
According to an abortion TV reporter, in Chinese society, boys are more highly valued than girls because they carry on the family name, inherit property, do the farm work and care for their parents when they get old. The natural ratio between boy births and girl births is 6 percent more boy births than girl births. Chinese parents in the rural province of the lower Yangtze Region from 1989-1990 reported 119 percent more boy births than the accepted average, so researchers know that over half of the girls have been disposed of (Lubman, “Infanticide detailed in China.”). According to the New York Times, China had 32 million more boys than girls under age 20 (LaFraniere “Chinese Bias for Baby Boys Creates a Gap of 32 Million.”). Since people would naturally want a boy and they can only have one child, they would want to get rid of the girl if they had a girl. McClatchy tells us people do this by drowning them, aborting them and abandoning them in a public place (McClatchy. “Mom and pop' baby-trafficking ring provided Chinese girls for adoption.”). So people will see her and take her to the orphanage where children are fatally neglected. Talia Carner, author of, China Doll states, “Imagine a state-run rat-infested institution in which babies are fed diluted rice water and have no heat or medical care and you begin to grasp the horror.” (Carner, “Holocaust of Female Babies”).
Also, there are shortages of girls. Boys have a hard time finding girls to marry because of this and it results in people kidnapping girls and selling them to men to be their wife states McManus (McManus, “Holocaust of Female Babies”).
Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) says China came up with a new policy: the one and a half child policy for some rural areas. If your first child is a girl you can have two children. It evens out the population. Couples who violate the policy have to pay a fine, which can equal $20000 U.S. dollars, which many people can’t pay (pbs.org. China’s One Child Policy).

The authorities sometimes make it so that you have to get an abortion instead of paying the fee and losing the benefits they give you if you follow the one child policy. Here is an example found by NPR’s (National Public Radio) Louisa Lim.
““Liang Yage and his wife Wei Linrong had one child and believed that — like many other couples — they could pay a fine and keep their second baby. Wei was 7 months pregnant when 10 family planning officials visited her at home on April 16.
Liang describes how they told her she would have to have an abortion, "You don't have any more room for maneuver," he says they told her. "If you don't go [to the hospital], we'll carry you." The couple was then driven to Youjiang district maternity hospital in Baise city.”
"I was scared," Wei told NPR. "The hospital was full of women who'd been brought in forcibly. There wasn't a single spare bed. The family planning people said forced abortions and forced sterilizations were both being carried out. We saw women being pulled in one by one. The couple was given a consent agreement to sign. When Liang refused, family planning officials signed it for him. He and his wife are devout Christians — he is a pastor — and they don't agree with abortion.
The officials gave Wei three injections in the lower abdomen. Contractions started the next afternoon, and continued for almost 16 hours. Her child was stillborn.
Medical sources say fetuses aborted in this manner would have been dead for some time, so the tissue is necrotic and thus dark in color.
"The nurses dealt with the body like it was rubbish," Wei said. "They wrapped it up in a black plastic bag and threw it in the trash.”” (Lim, “Cases of Forced Abortions Surface in China.”)
According to the National Report Online, the People’s Republic of China “defends its one-child policy in part on the claim that it will increase the quality of China's population. This frightening eugenic mindset encompasses a list of policies that are designed to weed out persons with severe mental or physical disabilities, including policies that permit for the sterilization of individuals with severe mental impairments or physical disabilities. Carriers of certain genetic diseases and diseases that are communicable during childbirth are also sterilized.” (Noonan, “One-Child Crackdown.”)
Eugenics, according to WordNet is “the study of methods of improving genetic qualities by selective breeding (especially as applied to human mating)” (Eugenics, WordNet Search 3.0.).
Respect for human life has been lost. It has been replaced with greed to improve the economy of China and to improve, by the practice of eugenics, the population. Add to this the practice of trafficking women as they are sold or kidnapped across national borders to be in bondage as prostitutes, says McManus (McManus, “Holocaust of Female Babies”).
Lastly what should our response be? The UN will do nothing because the European Union and Canada support China’s one child policy. They do not want to restrict abortion at all. If they don’t do anything against it who will? Why not us? If we don’t do anything more people are going to be kidnapped and trafficked to people who want a wife or people who force them to become prostitutes because the demand for girls is really high.
In fact, McClatchy reported, some government run agencies were actually paying to have the babies trafficked to their orphanages because the demand for Chinese baby girls was so high Then later people, who had been trafficking babies, if they got caught, were sent to prison while the government officers who bought the babies were promoted. (McClatchy, “Mom and pop' baby-trafficking ring provided Chinese girls for adoption”). This is ridiculous. If anything, the officers should have gone to jail for paying people who thought that since the government officials asked them to do it that it wasn’t against the law.
Where do they get the babies from? People give them the children when they hear their girls or defected boys will have a better home. Almost a quarter of those who "abandon" children are unmasked by authorities and subject to extreme penalties -- this high percentage signals how families or birth mothers risk discovery in the interests of the child they cannot raise due to family planning laws, poverty or illness Cecere says (SIS-EAR) (Cecere, “Chinese orphanages: for cross-cultural adoptive families with children from China”).
Carner tells us there are only 300 to 600 orphanages in China that use the money from western charities while there are 4000 government run orphanages (Indifference or Just Silence? : GENDERCIDE IN CHINA”). So if you are looking to adopt, you should first consider adopting from the “state-run rat-infested institution” orphanages, and give money to them so the girls are not in a rat infested place. You can also give to the Amity Foundation at amityfoundation.org, which supports and keeps track of the conditions and girls in some orphanages. We should also pray for the girls to have a good home, and that China will repeal the one child policy and thus stabilize the population, because God doesn’t look at us as a world of 6.8 billion people but sees each person individually. Every life is valuable. Also the one child policy is a violation of human rights and free will the US government should not support this policy at all. It is a violation of what we as residents of the United States and as Christians believe. As Christians, it is our duty to stand up for what is right.
In conclusion, I have stated the reason for the one child policy as a fear of a lack of resources, how it has lead to a lack of respect for human life and how we should respond to this issue.