China’s one-child policy is just as it reads: couples are only allowed to have one child. Due to this, China is missing as many as 37 million girls, says All Girls Allowed. And according to The Economist, there are an estimated 32 million Chinese boys who will never marry because the women they would have taken as spouses were never born. And although China enacted a 2004 law against sex-selective abortions, it is widely ignored (Chinese women are more likely to abort a girl rather than a boy).
Chai claims 86 per cent of Chinese women go through at least one abortion and 52 per cent have two or more. Given the pressure from husbands and in-laws clamouring for a male heir, combined with a legal regime which limits most Han Chinese to a single baby, Chinese abortions of female fetuses can only be characterized as coerced, said Chai.
Through a network of volunteers in China, All Girls Allowed (www.allgirlsallowed.org) gives monetary and other support for women who give birth to their illegal second and third children.
A society that denies women the ordinary, human fulfillment of giving birth to their own children, of loving them and raising them in a family soon loses its moral sense, said Chai.
Chai Ling, founder of All Girls Allowed.
photo courtesy of All Girls Allowed
“Compassion needs to be brought into this society to help women overcome the spirit of despair, to find God, to come to know Jesus through prayer, to reduce every day abortions,” she said.
Chai claims Jesus as her inspiration for a movement which she claims continues a struggle that began in Tiananmen Square 22 years ago.
“We are in the second phase of the Tiananmen Square movement,” she said.
“The first phase was a waking up. The students went to the square to request freedom, request reform of the political system to allow the rule of law, democracy and freedom of the media. But we also wanted to know the
truth about the country, to end corruption... I now realize we were in a spiritual awakening.”
Chai arrived in Tiananmen Square as just another 23-year-old graduate student, there to mourn the death of former Communist Party of China general secretary Hu Yaobang. Hu had been purged from the party after calling for political and economic reforms, along with a re-examination of contemporary Chinese culture and spiritual values.
“At the time we didn’t quite understand what he was talking about and we concentrated on political reform and economic reform,” said Chai.
In 1989 she began bringing food to other students in the square. But Chai was called a “general commander” of the student movement by the time tanks rolled through June 4. With the help of activists in Hong Kong, she eventually escaped to Paris and then the United States where she took an MBA from Harvard and founded an Internet company. In 2009 she became a Christian. In 2010 she founded All Girls Allowed.
Though there has been a degree of reform in China post-Tiananmen Square, there’s more to building a society than economics, she said.
“We’ve only had economic reform, which created what we have today — a huge gap between rich and poor,” said Chai.
But the class warfare in China pales in comparison with what Chai calls a war on women and children.
“It’s an awful value system toward women. It really disproportionately values men (in) a male chauvinist type of environment,” she said. “What happened in China is not acceptable in any culture, by any moral standards. A woman there is not allowed to give birth to two babies. The women have no choice and babies have no right to life.”
China’s government claims its population-control policies are not to blame for the growing imbalance of the sexes.
“It is incorrect to simply equate the family planning policy to mandatory one-child policy as the cause for gender imbalance,” a spokesperson for China’s Canadian embassy told The Catholic Register. “The Chinese government firmly opposes and prohibits any form of compulsory abortion or abandoning, abusing or discrimination against baby girls.”
Boys born in China
Thirty years of official Chinese population control policy has prevented about 40 million births, said the embassy. That’s a 3.1-per-cent reduction in China’s population. “Thanks to the family planning policy the population reached 1.3 billion four years later than estimated,” said the embassy spokesperson.
Some demographers question the value of a four-year delay in reaching 1.3 billion. There will be a heavy price to pay for a fertility rate far below replacement and even below the rates found in the most advanced economies, said Brookings-Tsinghua Centre director Feng Wang in an essay published in May.
“Continued low fertility with accelerating aging — for a country where the overall economy has grown rapidly but measured at a per capita basis is still at a very low level — raises concerns not just for labour supply but also for the ability of the government and families to support a rapidly expanding elderly population,” wrote Feng.
In China, it is those missing girls who would have cared for their elderly parents in years to come.
Hebrew University of Jerusalem demographer Avraham Ebenstein puts the blame for China’s gender imbalance on the one-child policy combined with widespread access to sonography. Based on China’s 2000 census, Ebenstein estimates “pre-natal selection and infanticide can account for a female deficit of roughly 9.3 million missing girls,” he said in the winter 2010 edition of the Journal of Human Resources. He calls this estimate “conservative.”
All Girls Allowed believes the more realistic number is 37 million missing girls.
The burden of the one-child policy is being born now by Chinese women, said Chai.
“That woman has to be forced or coerced either by political or legal or economic pressure, or psychological pressure, to give up that baby,” said Chai. “That woman is imprisoned in despair. That woman should not be condemned, should be supported, should be prayed for and loved.”
Chai went through two abortions as a student in China, then a third as a political refugee in Paris whose marriage was breaking down.