One Child Left Behind

IN OCTOBER, China’s Communist Party leadership announced the end of its nearly 40-year-old “one child” policy, announcing that all married couples could now have two children.

The one-child policy in China was established by Deng Xiaoping in the mid-1970s, first as a voluntary program, then as federal policy. He said it was necessary to make sure that “the fruits of economic growth are not devoured by population growth.” His tool for ensuring economic growth was the large-scale control of women’s bodies. The results have been well-documented: massive numbers of coerced abortions and sterilizations and women with “unapproved” pregnancies avoiding prenatal medical care for fear of such coercion. Women have been and continue to be intensely traumatized by a government policy that is indifferent to their pain.

This policy has also disrupted the gender balance in China. The introduction of ultrasound technology that easily identifies the baby’s gender in utero has led to female feticide—sex-selective abortions. Millions of little girls are dead because they were girls and not boys. Women are aborting their daughters because of their shared gender. What does this do to women’s own self-esteem and self-image?

This is not a glitch in China’s system of population control, but a central feature of it. If you have 50 women and one polygamous man, you can have many babies at once. But if you have 50 men and one woman, you get no more babies than if you have only one fertile man and one woman. If reducing the overall number of people is your goal, then targeting females gets you more bang for the buck, so to speak.

Now, nearly four decades later, China has ended the one-child policy and raised the ceiling to a two-child limit. The number of specific pregnancies aborted may diminish, but the change in law did not include an end to coercion. Perhaps couples who have a son or who can try for one with the second child will let one daughter live. But if both children are daughters, the same violence against females for being females is likely to occur.

With the current gender imbalance in China, large numbers of men can’t find wives at all. As a result prostitution, sex trafficking, and rape have increased.

So the aspect of massive violence against women hasn’t been solved. It may be ameliorated, but the root of the intensive control of women’s lives remains.

One question we have to ask is why has such an astonishingly massive amount of blatant violence against women received so little attention from women’s rights advocates? I think it’s because of the idea of abortion itself as a matter of “women’s rights.” Admitting there are times when abortion so clearly means violence against women would require saying something negative about abortion. If it’s “a woman’s right,” then it may appear to threaten that right to admit to its use as a tool in the context of blatant male domination.

But in the United States, the same problems are simply more subtle. The government doesn’t coerce women, but abusive male partners and parents of teens sometimes do. Pressure is more common than outright social or political coercion. And poverty is the most widespread and cruelest pressure of all.

In the U.S. it is less common to have selective abortions based on gender, but a child detected in utero with disabilities is in deep trouble. If born or adopted into a loving family, plenty of parents find raising such children to be full of joy. But far too many aren’t allowed to be born at all.

So China has gone from a policy of massive attacks on its own women and prenatal girls to a policy in which presumably fewer individuals are attacked. The root problem, however, remains.

China’s policy was allowed to develop without the worldwide outcry warranted for such astonishing brutality targeted toward women because of the idea of abortion as a right. Somehow coercing someone into a “right” seems less bad. But whenever we solve problems by dehumanizing and killing the most vulnerable, the violence grabs other people into its web as well.