Kathryn Jean Lopez
National Review Online
8/22/2011
Yesterday, during remarks at Sichuan University yesterday, Joe Biden said:
Your policy has been one which I fully understand — I’m not second-guessing — of one child per family. The result being that you’re in a position where one wage earner will be taking care of four retired people. Not sustainable.
Forced abortion. Fully understandable, in the words of our Scranton-born, rosary-clutching vice president?
I am pretty sure Michigan Republican congressman Thad McCotter wouldn’t have minded if Biden had borrowed some of his words instead. McCotter spoke with urgent clarity on the issue at the Ames Straw Poll (the subject of my syndicated column this week). Biden also could have taken some leadership lessons from John Boehner, who brought the issue up with Chinese president Hu Jintao when he was in Washington earlier this year. Needless to say, the speaker of the House was not as understanding.
“It’s disappointing that Vice President Biden did not mention the severe women’s rights atrocities that are committed in the name of the One Child Policy — forced abortion, involuntary sterilization, and gendercide,” Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women’s Rights without Frontiers, says. “China’s One Child Policy causes more violence to women and girls than any other official policy on earth. To merely mention the economic consequences is to turn a blind eye to the terrible human suffering caused by forced abortion. Chinese women are literally dragged out of their homes, strapped to tables and forced to abort.”
The policy, as it happens, has been not only a moral but a demographic disaster. “The One Child Policy was instituted for economic reasons,” Littlejohn adds. “It’s ironic that through this very policy, China has written it’s own economic, demographic death sentence.”
Let’s make sure the next White House administration gets all this, instead of kowtowing to our creditor.
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