A Real Scar & War

Some images should make an indelible mark. Don’t click on this link unless you’re prepared to keep this image with you.

The photo is of Feng Jianmei and her dead child. She was reportedly taken from her home by government officials while her husband was at work and after refusing to pay fines, her child was killed on June 3.

At a ceremony today in Washington at the Victims of Communism Memorial, Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women’s Rights Without Borders, told this mother’s story, and put what has been done to her family in its historic context:

Dr. Edwards and honored guests, I am greatly humbled by being asked to speak on this somber anniversary commemorating five years of the Victims of Communism Memorial. It is fitting that the Memorial statue itself is a replica of the Goddess of Democracy erected by the students on Tianamen Square – a beacon of hope for those students before they were then so brutally slaughtered by their own government.

Indeed, this is the hallmark of Communistic governments: the peacetime mass killings of their own citizens. It is estimated that the former Soviet Union under Stalin committed 20 million such killings, and that the Chinese Communist Party under Mao Tse-tung committed 65 million: together, 85 million. This number of murders of innocent civilians by their own governments boggles the mind.

And yet even this number is dwarfed by another, hidden category of victims of communism – victims of China’s One Child Policy.

Women’s Rights Without Frontiers has learned that a woman in Shanxi Province, China, was forcibly aborted at seven months of pregnancy on June 3, 2012 – just last week.

Feng Jianmei was beaten and dragged into a vehicle by a group of Family Planning Officials while her husband, Deng Jiyuan, was out working. The officials asked for RMB 40,000 in fines from Feng Jianmei’s family. When they did not receive the money, they forcibly aborted Feng at seven months, laying the body of her aborted baby next to her in the bed.
Feng Jianmei is not alone. The Chinese Communist Party estimates that it has “prevented” 400 million lives through its brutal One Child Policy. Every one of these 400 million snuffed out lives is a victim of communism.

Affecting 1.3 billion people, the coercive enforcement of China’s One Child Policy causes more violence against women and girls than any other official policy on earth and any other official policy in the history of the world.

1. Forced abortion is traumatic to women. This can happen up to the ninth month of pregnancy. Some forced abortions are so violent that the women themselves die, along with their full term babies. Forced abortion is official government rape.

2. Women who have violated the policy are often victims of forced sterilization, which can lead to life-long health complications. These forced abortions and forced sterilizations are often performed without anesthesia.

3. A document leaked out of China in November 2009 discusses methods of infanticide, including the puncturing of the skulls and injecting alcohol into the brains of full term babies, usually girls, to kill them during labor.

4. Because of the traditional preference for boys, sex-selective abortion of girls is common — a form of “gendercide.”

5. Because of this gendercide, there are an estimated 37 million more men than women in China today. This gender imbalance is a major force driving sexual slavery of women and girls in Asia.

6. China has the highest female suicide rate of any country in the world – approximately 500 women a day. I believe this high suicide rate is related to forced abortion.

The One Child Policy is causing a slow-motion demographic disaster. Not only does the nation now suffer from a destabilizing gender imbalance, but also, there are not enough young people to sustain China’s rapidly ageing population. Why, then, does China continue this policy?

I believe that China’s One Child Policy is keeping the regime in place. It is social control, masquerading as population control. The Chinese Communist Party wields forced abortion as an instrument of terror to keep its people down. The infrastructure of population control coercion can be turned in any direction, to crush dissent. The use of a system of paid informants to identify illegally pregnant women tears at relationships of trust. If you cannot trust anyone, you cannot organize for democracy.

The true spirit of Communism is most clearly seen in the faces of the Chinese population control police as they drag women away, beat them, strap them down to tables, and force them to abort babies that they want, up to the ninth month of pregnancy. Whether China will turn and become a free, democratic nation, or whether China will continue down the path of totalitarian destruction, is the greatest issue of the twenty-first century and has vast implications for our own national security. Supporting democracy in China should be among the highest priorities of the leaders of the free world.

More on an actual war on women here:

Read Nick Eberstadt’s “Global War on Baby Girls” piece from The New Atlantis if you have not already. Not on our watch.

How can we tolerate this? By which I mean, how can we not insist this end? How can we not shine a light and call it the evil that it is?

On the 25th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s Brandenberg Gate speech, we ought to consider what we want in our national leaders, what kind of country we want to be.

People still listen to us. We still have a platform, a Constitution to stand on! We ought not look away. We cannot afford to be silent.

We know better. We are better. I do not mean that in a chauvinistic way but as a call to stewardship. There is something exceptional about this nation, and it rests in an appreciation for what our most precious gifts are and Who they come from. (Liberty is not to be merely accommodated by the state.)

And a garbled refusal to second-guess China’s brutal one-child policy, I’m afraid, is not quite what the model here to emulate.

A lack of courage in defense of freedom and human dignity is a scar, leaving open the question of freedom for all mankind.

In his speech in Germany 25 years ago today, the president of the United States said: “the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace.” The advance of human liberty requires people willing to protect and defend it. If even by calling a congressman and asking him to defend conscience. If only to remind a friend or family member that liberty is not a gift of the state to be accommodated by passing along a clarifying article you’ve just read. For you and I, it starts there.

And with prayer. Ready for a Fortnight of it, for a start?

And peace? That’s a long road, isn’t it? I’m reminded of a little woman and her Nobel speech in 1979. Blessed Mother Teresa said:

I was surprised in the West to see so many young boys and girls given into drugs, and I tried to find out why – why is it like that, and the answer was: Because there is no one in the family to receive them. Father and mother are so busy they have no time. Young parents are in some institution and the child takes back to the street and gets involved in something. We are talking of peace. These are things that break peace, but I feel the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a direct war, a direct killing – direct murder by the mother herself. And we read in the Scripture, for God says very clearly: Even if a mother could forget her child – I will not forget you – I have carved you in the palm of my hand. We are carved in the palm of His hand, so close to Him that unborn child has been carved in the hand of God. And that is what strikes me most, the beginning of that sentence, that even if a mother could forget something impossible – but even if she could forget – I will not forget you. And today the greatest means – the greatest destroyer of peace is abortion. And we who are standing here – our parents wanted us. We would not be here if our parents would do that to us. Our children, we want them, we love them, but what of the millions. Many people are very, very concerned with the children in India, with the children in Africa where quite a number die, maybe of malnutrition, of hunger and so on, but millions are dying deliberately by the will of the mother. And this is what is the greatest destroyer of peace today. Because if a mother can kill her own child – what is left for me to kill you and you kill me – there is nothing between. And this I appeal in India, I appeal everywhere: Let us bring the child back, and this year being the child’s year: What have we done for the child? At the beginning of the year I told, I spoke everywhere and I said: Let us make this year that we make every single child born, and unborn, wanted. And today is the end of the year, have we really made the children wanted? I will give you something terrifying. We are fighting abortion by adoption, we have saved thousands of lives, we have sent words to all the clinics, to the hospitals, police stations – please don’t destroy the child, we will take the child. So every hour of the day and night it is always somebody, we have quite a number of unwedded mothers – tell them come, we will take care of you, we will take the child from you, and we will get a home for the child. And we have a tremendous demand from families who have no children, that is the blessing of God for us. And also, we are doing another thing which is very beautiful – we are teaching our beggars, our leprosy patients, our slum dwellers, our people of the street, natural family planning.

And in Calcutta alone in six years — it is all in Calcutta — we have had 61,273 babies less from the families who would have had, but because they practise this natural way of abstaining, of self-control, out of love for each other. We teach them the temperature meter which is very beautiful, very simple, and our poor people understand. And you know what they have told me? Our family is healthy, our family is united, and we can have a baby whenever we want. So clear – those people in the street, those beggars – and I think that if our people can do like that how much more you and all the others who can know the ways and means without destroying the life that God has created in us.

It’s no wonder we’re not the stalwart defenders of liberty and therefore real peace we could be. We are confused about human dignity and flourishing. This is so, all too often, in our culture and our relationships, so of course it would be in our politics. And so what are you and I doing about it? Witness and education. Catechesis and prayer. Charity. It’s not just the call of a bishop to be a leader here.

Read more at CatholicVote.org