Her mother’s abortion was required under China’s one-child policy. Her own would be illegal under Tennessee’s post-Roe ban

by Eric Boodman
Sept. 29, 2022

It started as a joke. Jen was early in her first pregnancy, sitting with her husband after lunch. You know those gimmicky websites, he was saying, where you can name a star after someone and the person gets a certificate in the mail? What if, instead, we named our child after the biggest planet in the solar system?

He was kidding, but Jen kind of liked it. Jupiter. She liked the sound of it — and how awesome, to share a name with something so huge, encircled by so many moons. She hadn’t imagined herself as a mom. When they were looking at houses, she’d insisted on a yard for their dog; she hadn’t been thinking about room for kids. But then something in her shifted, and here they were, in their dining room, in a green-lawned Tennessee neighborhood, joking about what to call their first child. Jupiter was a perfect middle name — semi-secret, a nod to this wild gravitational pull.

Continued: https://www.statnews.com/2022/09/29/abortion-roe-tennessee-ban-fetal/

29.09.2022

Is abortion legal in China, how common is it and why is it controversial?

Mimi Lau
19 Jun, 2022

The US Supreme Court is expected to overturn the country’s landmark 1973 Roe v Wade ruling, which guaranteed women’s right to abortion nationwide despite widespread protests, according to a draft of a majority opinion that was leaked last month.

In China – which has one of the world’s highest recorded abortion rates – women’s reproductive rights have also historically been a contentious issue, but are seen through a very different cultural lens.

Continued: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3182106/abortion-legal-china-how-common-it-and-why-it-controversial

19.06.2022

sex selection abortion

sex selective abortions

China’s complex abortion problem

20 APR 2022
YI FUXIAN

Recent official pronouncements in China have sparked speculation that tighter restrictions on abortion may be in the offing. Six months ago, the Chinese State Council issued guidelines to lower the number of abortions performed for non-medical reasons. And in February, China's family-planning association announced that the authorities would launch a special abortion intervention campaign to reduce unwanted pregnancies and abortions among teenagers.

But these official interventions, under the guise of "enhancing women's reproductive health", are in fact a response to China's growing fertility crisis. The one-child policy, which was implemented nationwide in 1980, forced down China's fertility rate for two generations, and the introduction of the two-child policy in 2016 has failed to boost it. Even according to the inflated official figures, China's fertility rate was only 1.3 children per woman in 2020 and 1.1-1.2 children per woman last year, well below the rates of 1.8, 1.7, and 1.5 predicted by the Chinese authorities, the United Nations, and the US Census Bureau, respectively.

Continued: https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/opinion/2297238/chinas-complex-abortion-problem

20.04.2022

Commentary

Featured

China's fertility crisis

Chinese State Council

China says it’s restricting abortions to promote gender equality. Experts are skeptical

Analysis by Jessie Yeung and Nectar Gan, CNN

Fri October 1, 2021

Hong Kong (CNN) For decades, Chinese authorities imposed strict limits on families that forced millions of women to abort pregnancies deemed illegal by the state.

That harsh practice has become less common since China relaxed its one-child policy in 2015. So when news emerged this week that the government wants to reduce abortions for "non-medical reasons," the backlash was swift and furious.

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/01/china/non-medical-abortions-mic-intl-hnk/index.html

01.10.2021

sex-selective abortion

Abortion pledge adds to scepticism over women’s rights in China

Analysis: plan to reduce abortions as birthrates plunge draws comparisons to The Handmaid’s Tale

Helen Davidson in Taipei
Wed 29 Sep 2021

Far-reaching proposals from Beijing on “women’s development” have sparked concern over a pledge to reduce abortions, with feminists and academics pointing to the government’s history of control over women’s reproductive rights.

On Monday China’s state council published its latest 10-year outline for women’s development. The lengthy document contained guidelines for China’s gender-based policy, but it was a short phrase that caught particular attention: a pledge to “reduce abortions conducted for non-medical reasons”.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/29/abortion-pledge-adds-to-scepticism-over-womens-rights-in-china

29.09.2021

China restricts abortions for ‘non-medical purposes’

Move comes as China introduces new policies aimed at encouraging families to have more children amid concerns over a decline in birthrates.

27 Sep 2021

China has issued new guidelines restricting the number of abortions performed for “non-medical purposes”.

The State Council, China’s cabinet, published the new rules on Monday.

Continued: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/27/china-restricts-abortions-for-non-medical-purposes

27.09.2021

Featured

News

non-medical abortions

one-child policy

sex-selective abortion

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/

08.11.2019

Featured

Film, Art, Books

China one-child policy

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

11.06.2018

China one-child policy

forced abortion

one-child policy

reproduction planning policy

Researchers may have ‘found’ many of China’s 30 million missing girls

By Simon Denyer November 30, Washington Post

Academics often talk about between 30 and 60 million “missing girls” in China, apparently killed in the womb or just after birth, thanks to a combination of preference for sons and the country’s decades under a repressive one-child policy.

Now researchers in the United States and China think they might have found many — or even most — of them, and argue they might not have been killed after all.

[continued at link]
Source: Washington Post

30.11.2016

News

China's missing girls