Politics
Wednesday November 16, 2005
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Hilary Clinton Urges President Bush to Discuss Forced Abortion on China Trip
By John-Henry Westen
WASHINGTON, November 16, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) - After years of being urged by pro-lifers and Christians to condemn China's one-child policy, President George W. Bush is now being urged in the same direction by none other than Democratic Senator Hilary Clinton. In a letter to the President dated November 10, Clinton wrote, "I hope you will raise with the Chinese government the following points," the first of which concerns the coercive one-child program.
"Since first introduced in 1979, China's one-child policy has evoked strong concern over human rights abuses. These abuses have reportedly included denial of social benefits, fines, detention, destruction of property, forced abortion and forced sterilization. . .," she wrote. "In 1995, as a participant in the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, I heard first hand about these practices and spoke against them. In 2002, China enacted a Population and Family Planning Law aimed at ending human rights violations associated with the one-child policy. However, the 2004 State Department Country Report on Human Rights Practices suggests uneven Chinese enforcement of the law, with continuing use of psychological and economic pressure and threats to force women to terminate pregnancies or undergo sterilization." See the Clinton letter here: http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/nov/051115a.html
Sen. Clinton also condemned these human rights abuses in a November 10 speech to the American Bar Association International Rule of Law Symposium.
For comment on Clinton's intervention LifeSiteNews.com spoke with the Population Research Institute, the group founded by Stephen Mosher who first exposed to the world the horrors of the one-child policy. "We are grateful to Sen. Clinton for choosing to highlight this issue just before President Bush's trip to China," said Joseph A. D'Agostino, Vice President for Communications at PRI. "Too often, discussion of the Communist Chinese government's human rights abuses includes religious and political persecution, but fails to mention the one-child policy, which restricts the rights of every family in China."
"I am glad that Sen. Clinton has raised the profile of this official, systematic abuse of the rights of Chinese women and their husbands," said Steven Mosher, President of PRI. "Although Sen. Clinton generally takes the wrong side when it comes to the life issues, we are very pleased that she has not remained silent when it comes to this persecution of Chinese mothers as so many feminist and so-called pro-choice leaders have. Chinese law officially forbids Chinese families from having more than one or two children."
"The problem is that Sen. Clinton still supports U.S. funding for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)," continued Mosher. "The UNFPA subsidizes China's population control apparatus. Sen. Clinton should join President Bush in opposing funding for this agency until it ceases its financial support for forced abortion and sterilization in China. She should bring her policy into line with her rhetoric."
"We hope that President Bush, Sen. Clinton, and others will continue to press this issue and propose specific incentives to persuade China to change her oppressive policies," concluded D'Agostino.
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