cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/56322020
The screams started at night.
Anna was lying in bed in the cramped fifth-floor apartment she shared with her parents when she heard the neighbour being taken away. The cries grew louder as the woman’s family fought back against a group of men. But the struggle was in vain. The woman, who was pregnant with what would have been her second child, was shoved inside a car and driven off.
The next day, Anna heard her mother cursing under her breath. It was inhumane what they did to that woman, her mother said. Anna didn’t understand. All the families of workers from the same factory lived here in a close-knit community. Everyone in the compound must have heard the woman’s screams. Why did no one save her?
The incident took place in eastern China in the early 1990s. Anna was five at the time. Years would pass before she learnt that the woman screaming in the night was just one of hundreds of millions to have a pregnancy terminated under the country’s one-child policy. And it would take decades for her to truly understand the extent to which one of the most extreme social experiments in history had cast a shadow over her own life.
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The totalitarian policy […] has, along with its barbarous enforcement, been criticised inside and outside China. Chinese government data from around the late 2000s showed the country’s doctors had, since the early 1970s, officially performed more than 330mn abortions. Exactly how many of those abortions were coerced or sex-selective will never be known. Chinese researchers have put the number of “missing” girls, from sex-selective abortions or infanticide, at about 20mn. Today, there are an estimated 28mn-35mn more men than women in China, a grouping known as the “leftover men”.
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Official data also showed that more than 320mn Chinese women have been fitted with contraceptive IUDs (which studies have linked to health complications in longtime users) and close to 110mn underwent tubal sterilisation. Meanwhile, the number of babies born in violation of the policy, and therefore unable to access basic education and health services, was estimated in the tens of millions.
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“The consensus is that the [one-child] policy wasn’t needed in the first place and then the second-best scenario would have been to roll it back much earlier,” said Sarah Mellors Rodriguez, a historian who has written a book about Chinese population control. “Prolonging it through the 2000s was an enormous mistake.”
The commitment to the one-child policy for 35 years has come to illustrate fundamental flaws of China’s party-state. Once the party’s leaders have something under their control, in this case, the reproductive organs of the entire population, they rarely relinquish that control. Nor can they admit they are wrong until it is too late.
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