An aging China is going to make it harder for women to get abortions

By Jane Li & Tripti Lahiri
Published September 27, 2021

For decades, abortion was freely available to women in China. In fact, as a tool of the one-child policy, it was traumatically forced on women to make them conform to the state’s need to reduce the population.

But now that China is far more worried about its shrinking population, it seems to be reversing course and moving towards more carefully controlling how woman access abortion. In other words, abortion will continue to be a tool of state policy in China—it’s just that the policy has changed.

Continued: https://qz.com/2065112/china-will-make-abortions-harder-for-women-to-get/


China to clamp down on abortions for ‘non-medical purposes’

Policy uses women as tool for economic goals and could endanger their lives, says rights group

Kaamil Ahmed
Mon 27 Sep 2021

China’s pledge to limit abortions puts women’s bodies under the state’s control just as the one-child policy did and could endanger the lives of women seeking abortions, rights groups have said.

The Chinese government announced on Monday that it would seek to reduce abortions for “non-medical reasons” – a move seen as being in line with its attempts to accelerate birthrates.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/27/china-to-limit-abortions-for-non-medical-purposes


CHINA – One Child Nation: documentary film

CHINA – One Child Nation: documentary film

by International Campaign for Women's Right to Safe Abortion
Nov 8, 2019

Filmmakers Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang provide a very personal history of China’s one-child policy and how several generations of parents and children have been affected by the enforced policy of one-child families from 1979 to 2015. This powerful and controversial documentary, in English and Mandarin, shows the policy to be a cruel and tragic experiment in big-government meddling in the composition of families by the state whose after-effects persist. Women were forced to have abortions, there were forced sterilisations, babies were abandoned, but at the same time government policy aimed to reduce population growth in a country dealing with extreme poverty among a quarter of the world’s population. ‘We are fighting a population war’ was a common slogan used by the government during that period. Part of how the policy was promoted was through a propaganda culture created around an idealised one-child family: on playing cards, stickers, posters and in travelling opera performances. Nanfu Wang returns to her natal village to interview members of her own family and neighbours about how the policy affected them personally.

SOURCES: Official Trailer ; National Public Radio USA, 17 August 2019 ; Guardian, by Peter Bradshaw, 25 September 2019 ; Human Rights Watch

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Source: http://www.safeabortionwomensright.org/china-one-child-nation-documentary-film/


China is finally ending the one-child policy. It can’t happen soon enough.

China is finally ending the one-child policy. It can’t happen soon enough.

by Chen Guangcheng
June 11, 2018

Recent news reports suggest that the Chinese Communist Party is considering abandoning one of its longest-running and most abusive practices: its reproduction planning policy, commonly known as the one-child policy. The decision comes as the nation faces a number of domestic crises resulting from the policy, from a rapidly aging labor force to severe gender imbalances. Returning reproductive rights to the people, however, does not exempt the Communist Party from responsibility for decades of trauma and murder committed under the euphemistic rubric of population planning.

According to the Chinese authorities, at least 360 million fetuses and infants have been killed since 1979, when the regime instituted the one-child policy in order to control the expanding population. Structurally, this has been a complex, nationwide affair, organized at the top echelons of power and implemented at the local levels, with perks and promotions in store for officials who meet quotas.

Continued: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/china-is-finally-ending-the-one-child-policy-it-cant-happen-soon-enough/2018/06/11/5dde684c-6b4b-11e8-9e38-24e693b38637_story.html?utm_term=.4c098ed253a8