Essay, Research Paper
Abuse of women and children in china
In Joy Williams essay, The Case Against Babies , Williams mentions how the government of China takes a girl baby if the family has more than one. I have decided to look closer on that issue. I have asked myself, Why does the government have the right to take children away from families and who says they have the right to tell a family how many children they are allowed to have . As I looked further into this topic, I have come to realize that there are a lot more issues than just allowing families to have one girl.
In June of 1995, Britain s channel 4 television aired a documentary called The Dying Room . In it, Kate Blewett, Brian Woods, and Peter Hugh recorded what they found when they surreptiously filmed several orphanages run by the Chinese government. They found infants and children tied to their cots and left unattended without food and/or medical attention until they died. Some particularly haunting footage shows a little girl in the last stages of starvation, abandoned in one of the dying rooms that give the film its tittle. When the filmmakers called later to enquire about the girl, the orphanage denied that she ever existed. (Aired 58) Along with that, the article stated that China s state run orphanages run in thousands of deaths every year, and the article explained that the government of China gives sleeping pills instead of food to the children. With that being the first article I read, I got sick to my stomach and had to stop. If population is what they are trying to maintain, then I do not think that murdering children is the way to go about doing it. Personally, I believe that the United States should look into this and see what we could do about this situation. It is not humanly ethical to control population by death of innocent children. The poor children in China s orphanages surely did not ask for this. The government should not be killing those children because of the parent s screw-ups. Now, I do understand that there are too many children in orphanages and not enough space, but surely there has to be other options.
The real problem is the Chinese government s attitude towards the orphans. China s leaders consider these children surplus population. They try to prevent their birth by forced abortion (often so late in pregnancy as to amount to state mandated infanticide), and they boast of the numbers of births averted by China s coercive family planning program. To these authorities, the death of orphans is nothing to regret, because it further their objectives of reduced population growth. (Aired 58) I, myself being pro-choice about abortion, I do not have anything really to say. However, I do believe in abortion for only one reason and that would be if a woman had been raped. What it sounds like to me is that orphanages are the second way out if they cannot abort the baby in time. Just by the sound of it, I think that I would prefer my child to be aborted than to have my him/her to be tortured in the ways the children are being tortured, even though that does sound morbid. The government in China just seems to me to be very lazy and not wanting to find other ways to solve the overpopulation issue. Even though the United States has not really pushed the population issue, I really do not think that the U.S. would propose a way of dealing with it like killing children. When and if they do, that is the time I will be moving somewhere else. To show that our disapproval of Chinese human rights violations in China is serious, the U.S. should amend our immigration laws to recognize persecution under compulsory family planning programs as a basis for granting asylum. And we should withhold all funding from the UNFPA, ITPF, and any other organization that provides assistance to China s harsh birth control program. (Aird 61)
Now when you think that it is over, it is not. Not only do they punish the families, (or woman), by taking a girl from a family and putting her in an orphanage and torturing the girl, but they also have punishment for families who do not comply with the law, (just when you though it was safe to have babies ). According to the China Rights Forum, a twenty-two year old female population control officer told the journal about her everyday activities on the population control: Some of the people we are trying to control want to escape from us. Then we hold someone else in the family in a cell the mother, the father . for several weeks, several months, sometimes until the person in questioning shows up. Occasionally, the whole family disappears; they go off to another region. Then we burn their house . the first time I went to a village, I was very shocked by the violent behavior of my colleagues: they shout and threaten people with truncheons. But now, I am used to it. It is necessary for the enforcement of the rules. There are too many people in China. (5) The laws, just looking and reading them, make me sick. How can the government look the families straight in the eye, and take the children and torture them. The government needs to be taken over and something needs to be done. Thousands of children s blood is shed on government s hands every year. I have always been taught on how the Chinese are more advanced for the time. Well they were wrong and obviously so was I? The Chinese to me, are unjustly taking children and torturing and killing them. They are taking precious children, who do not know any better and slaughtering them like animals. And if the law is broken, the families are taken away and broken up. Now just when you think it is all over, there is more.
Let me touch on the abortion issue. Women are encouraged or forced to consent to abort from all the way up until the ninth moth of pregnancy, with unsterilized tools causing the women to become ill or even emotionally drained. One Chinese woman described, in a written statement provided to HIRC, how doctors in a Xi am hospital performed an abortion on her when she was eight and a half months pregnant. I was held down on the operating table. One doctor injected, through my belly, into my uterus, formaldehyde liquid I knew my child was to die in a few minutes 48 hours later, after being induced into labor, in front of a room full of people, I gave birth to a live baby boy He had a big head and lovely legs and arms But the doctors immediately killed him while I watched helplessly. Then they took him out to be thrown away. This woman has since developed depression. Whenever she recalls the scene of her baby being killed in front of her, she says she cries uncontrollably. (Unfair Burdens 4) You know, for a country that does so much to people who break the law and the very low amount of crime in the country, they have some very barbaric ways to control a simple issue of population control . Now, it seems to me like it is okay for the government to murder, but God forbid if the community were to kill. You know, it is what I always say, Practice what you preach . If you are not going to abide by what you say, it does not give you the right to do it under NO circumstances.
After the extensive look of just a few of the issues, I decided to look at the other side, as much as I regrettably did not want to. Just by looking at the most recent article, it seems that the government has seen what they were doing and tried to reform. The constitution on China clearly specifies: The state promotes the all around moral, intellectual and physical development of children and young people, children are protected by the state, and maltreatment of children is prohibited . (Shan 2) Now I do not know if actions, like I have discussed are taking place, but that would be a whole new paper. I could go on and on about issues that need to be changed, but that would require more pages than I am allowed.
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