As the Democratic National Convention trundles to its conclusion, a theme — and supposed partisan advantage — of “freedom” has emerged. Examined in detail, reproductive freedom, by which the Democrats mean no legal limits on abortion, is the leading edge of that theme. But reality has a way of intruding on rhetorical flourishes, as more stories emerge about the lack of freedom that surrounds this issue.
One insight that has emerged from new research is that of coercion and pressure to abort, whether financial, psychological, reputational, or other personal factors are at play. Survey research by David Reardon, Ph.D., Kathleen Rafferty, Ph.D., M.A., and Tessa Cox at the Charlotte Lozier Institute has found that nearly 70% of women reflecting on past abortions “described them as coerced, pressured, or inconsistent with their own values and preferences.” The finding does not necessarily mean that women regret their abortions in all such instances, but it does call into question the easy suggestion that abortion is a fruit of liberty.
A far starker example of the problem of presenting abortion as freedom is that it has been anything but for billions of people around the world, most notably in the People’s Republic of China. An article last Sunday at CNN.com updates the horrifying impacts of the Chinese Communist Party’s 35-year experiment with a mandatory one-child limit for its dominant Han population. Nearly a decade after the relaxation of that brutal policy, with the communist regime now encouraging women to have three children, the Chinese demographic situation remains dire.
The CNN report reveals what the family planning cadres and Chinese central planners missed. The one-child policy, with its huge financial penalties, frequent family separations, and forced abortions and sterilizations at any stage of pregnancy, has inflicted profound post-traumatic stress on Chinese women. As a Chinese feminist told CNN, “Coercive family planning, as a form of state violence, has scarred women deeply … and people just haven’t got over it yet.” Fertility and family life, it seems, are not spigots the state can turn on and off at will. Fear, not freedom, reigns.
The hard truth is that the massive anti-life trends of the past half-century, whether in the form of population mandates or laws that devalue the unborn child, are taking a toll across the globe and proving extremely hard to reverse. In China, after years of pro-growth promotion since the one-child policy ended in 2016, the total fertility rate — a statistical estimate of the number of children a woman would have in her lifetime if the current birth rate prevailed — stands at less than half of replacement, 1.0 child per woman. The replacement rate, the number of births that, if sustained over time, will allow a country to keep pace with deaths, is 2.1.
Numbers in the “free” West and among its allies, all of whom have spent decades as promoters and financiers of population control projects worldwide, are little better. The most recent estimated TFRs for Taiwan (1.11), South Korea (1.12), Japan (1.4), Italy (1.26), the United States (1.84), Canada (1.58), and many other democratic nations tell the story. In Japan, the aging population has led to the phenomenon of akiya, empty homes across the country for which there are no buyers. There are people shortages in these nations, not housing shortages.
A variety of U.S. and international analysts are keenly aware of these trends and writing about them from a range of perspectives. Measures to encourage fertility and childbearing are much discussed. But the tragedy of China is a cautionary tale. A broken bicycle or Lego set can be easily repaired. A broken spirit, a shattered, multigenerational chain of relationships and virtues, is far harder to fix.
For the West, which has been the sponsor of much of the damage, merely recognizing its existence and magnitude has been a monumental task. From the International Planned Parenthood Federation, to the Pathfinder Fund, to the United Nations Population Fund, measures to drive down birth rates and depersonalize the unborn have thrived for generations. Here and there an obligatory nod to voluntary family planning has been made, but an internet search for Planned Parenthood criticism of the one-child policy turns up only a single quotation from 2014.
In August 2011, then-Vice President Joe Biden told an assembled audience at a press conference in China, “You have no safety net. Your policy has been one which I fully understand — I’m not second-guessing — of one child per family.” A National Public Radio (NPR) report on the remark wanly stated it had rankled “anti-abortion” forces. They were indeed rankled, but the one-child policy was much more than a case of disrespect for life. It was the end of the freedom of families to be family.
The wages of the one-child policy have been scrutinized by voices often crying in the wilderness. Stephen W. Mosher’s “Broken Earth: The Rural Chinese” (1984); John S. Aird’s “Slaughter of the Innocents: Coercive Birth Control in China” (1990); and Jacqueline Kasun’s “The War Against Population: The Economics and Ideology of World Population Control” (1999) are still seminal works for understanding how China committed the worst human rights abuse of the last half century and how, far from forestalling these crimes, Western leaders often facilitated and masked them.
Occasionally, social heroes have arisen as well, chiefly the Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng and Congressman Chris Smith (R) of New Jersey. Chen’s brave protest of the one-child policy led to the welcome attention of the British actor Christian Bale in 2011 and Chen’s exodus to the United States in the spring of 2012, right about the time Vice President Biden chose to downplay human rights concerns. Smith’s role in exposing and resisting the policy, alongside Chen and groups like Reggie Littlejohn’s Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, has been a lifelong witness that has not always won him the plaudits of Washington, D.C. pundits and kingmakers.
Today, the UNFPA-China website continues to sing the praises of “sexual and reproductive health” in a nation desperately seeking a next generation via more top-down policies and directives. The goal remains, UNFPA-China says, a “world where every pregnancy is wanted,” and those that are not are disposable. Coercion is opposed, but no recognition appears of the grave harm done by decades of mandates at which the UNFPA winked and nodded.
One certainty about women in China is that there are millions fewer of them thanks to gender-selective abortion, traditional son preference, and aspects of the one-child policy that permitted some couples a second pregnancy if their first child was a girl. By some estimates gender selection had produced a deficit of 163 million girls across the world at the time of publication of Mara Hvistendahl’s landmark book “Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men” in 2012.
Encouraging an increase in birth rates may be laudable social policy, but it is doomed to fail if it is a mere expression of state ends, patriotic fervor, or economic doctrine. In fact, it should fail if these are its bases. The Chinese Communist Party, as strong today as ever, should have feared to tread on the sacred realms of marriage, family, and human life. It attempted to master and manipulate what should have been treated with reverence. It is no wonder that young Chinese women, many of them separated from their birth families or witnesses to brutal acts visited upon mothers by the cadres, recoil from even the whisper of a return to totalitarianism, whether anti-natal or pronatal.
Questions circulate this week about whether the Democrats’ nominee for vice president, Tim Walz, thinks intellectual and cultural commerce with China matters, but human rights, which includes the right to free elections and the right to life, do not. As his party winds up its celebratory week in Chicago, its age-old friend Planned Parenthood stands at curbside, offering “free” abortions and sterilizations, casual as the neighborhood taco truck.
As CNN’s unflinching report from contemporary China shows, rebuilding the fallen walls and eaves of family life in our aching world will be no easy task. Freedom is primary, but hope, fidelity, optimism, and virtue matter even more. The way home from the joy and freedom of Chicago is fraught with danger.
Chuck Donovan is a veteran family policy analyst and former Executive Vice President of Family Research Council.
