Angela Chininin Buele

It has been over 35 years since China introduced its one child policy.  Along the way, people around the world have chosen to view this as progress as they hailed reports of economic growth and decreased poverty.  In the 1980s, the UN even gave China’s Minister of Population Planning honors for “solving” China’s population crisis.  And just earlier this year, NPR published an article that largely criticized the one child policy, but then it concluded that the one child policy actually benefited the last generation of women by giving them more access to education since they were only children.

What they didn’t (or didn’t want to) see is the social castigation, coercion, and literal force used to implement this policy among families that wanted to have more than one child.  That is to say that both the Chinese government and international leaders at large were of a similar mindset–-just reduce the numbers; we don’t care what you have to do.  But men and women cared.  They wanted to have their children.

After tens of millions of forced sterilizations, a third of a billion – that’s 336,000,000 – children aborted, and untold millions of dollars of fines and other punishments enforced on parents who had children without permission, this has been a devastating generation for the Chinese people.

China’s men now have no wives.  Because so many parents wanted the cultural benefits of having their only child be a son, they were willing to kill their daughters in order to try again for a son.  This has happened as many as 100 million times since the one-child policy was introduced.

Parents who have lost their only child are lonely and vulnerable to destitution since nursing homes don’t want to admit elderly applicants who have no adult children to be responsible to pay for the services rendered.

It has been almost one year since the once child policy has been changed to a two child policy in China.  But no one knows when families who want more children will be able to trust that the threat of forced abortion is no longer looming from local authorities.

Where, I ask, has the voice of choice, Planned Parenthood been in all of this?  Where were the pink shirt protests in China?  According to a statement released in May of 2012, the PPFA (American branch of PP) opposes China’s family planning policies and practices.  In reality, however, Planned Parenthood is a proud member of IPPF, the very same organization that works alongside the Chinese government as they commit crimes against women and children.

The truth is that all abortion rights activists are in quite a difficult spot here.  If they decry forced abortions simply because the woman did not want to end her pregnancy, they have absolutely no way of comforting her.  Because they have fostered the rhetoric which claims that fetal tissue is not a person, all they can tell the victim of a forced abortion is that she can try to get pregnant again.  This is not compassion.  The woman mourns the loss of a beloved child, and she suffers heartbreak at the abortion that ended his or her life.  The love of a mother for her child is uncharted territory for those who call children unwanted tissue.

Key Question:  Do you find yourself in this impossible position – of being appalled by forced abortion but a proponent of voluntary abortion?

Unshakable Truth: “As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him” (Psalm 103:13).

If you come from a background of seeing an unborn child without compassion, the only way to have compassion on those who are devastated by abortion is through the compassion that God grants when we acknowledge Him as King of compassion and loving authority over all.  He is the Creator of all living things, and that includes unborn babies and you, too.  There is no way to truly love people without first being loved by Him.

The Real Choice: Are you willing to receive genuine love from Christ Jesus and give that same love to women and children in all circumstances?