MCLC: abortion and politics

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: abortion and politics
***********************************************************

Source: The New Yorker (6/15/12):
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/evanosnos/2012/06/abortion-and-politi
cs-in-china.html

ABORTION AND POLITICS IN CHINA
Posted by Evan Osnos

China convulsed 
<http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/14/world/asia/china-abortion/index.html> this
week around the story of Feng Jianmei, a twenty-three-year-old expectant
mother, who was escorted from a relative’s home in Shaanxi province by
local family-planning officials, shoved into a van, and driven to a
hospital. She was blindfolded and given a document to sign
<http://behindthewall.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/06/14/12222877-gruesome-phot
os-put-spotlight-on-chinas-one-child-policy?lite>. It didn’t matter that
she couldn’t see it; she knew why she was there. She had violated the
one-child policy. Two shots were injected into her belly, and on the
morning of June 4th she gave birth to a stillborn baby girl.

Afterward, while she lay on a metal-framed hospital bed, her sister took a
devastating (and, be warned, graphic) photo
<http://shanghaiist.com/2012/06/14/forced-late-term-abortion-shaanxi.php>:
mother, beside the bloodied remains of her daughter. It electrified the
country. By Thursday night, the topic had attracted a million comments on
Weibo, the Chinese Twitter, and rage was mounting. China’s family-planning
system has been “openly killing people for years in the name of national
policy,” a commenter wrote on Clubkdnet.net
<http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hCMDFM-xcZoWfd9msvqWVMu
Kk5hw?docId=CNG.d6df1ef8efbf71bc1c117f39171b17e4.341>. “What is wrong with
society?” Li Chengpeng, a widely followed commentator, wrote, “A
seven-month baby can think already. I want to ask the murderer, how do you
face your own mother when you go home? If this evil policy is not stopped,
this country will have no humanity.”

There has always been a vast and curious gap between the way abortion is
perceived in the United States and in China. For years, the Chinese public
has looked on, with some confusion, at the fact that it’s a litmus-test
issue in America. In China, it is a largely unremarked-upon feature of
life, despite growing steadily from 1979, when the government began its
policy to curb the growth of the world’s largest population. By 1983, the
number of abortions had nearly tripled, to 14.4 million, and, that year,
the government relaxed the policy to allow rural families a second child
if the first was a girl. But in the years that followed, the one-child
policy came to occupy an awkward position in the public consciousness:
reviled on a personal level, but passively tolerated on a national level
because the blunt fact was that people were glad not to have more people
among them, more competition for food and jobs and college admissions.
Today, family planning is promoted
<http://www.allgirlsallowed.org/browse/results/taxonomy%3A25?page=8> by a
vast system that dispenses contraceptives and keeps track of births, but
it mainly focusses on married couples. Partly because contraceptives are
not as actively promoted to unmarried people, hospitals have described an
uptick in voluntary abortions by single women in recent years, and
services are advertised as “Safe & Easy A+.”

That ambivalence explained, in part, why people in China never rallied as
actively as you might expect around Chen Guangcheng, the blind lawyer who
was persecuted by local officials for trying to stop forced abortions and
sterilizations, eventually taking refuge in the American Embassy, and
going to the United States with his family as a visiting scholar at N.Y.U.
It was also one reason why Chen’s fervent embrace by American
conservatives, who saw him as a comrade-in-arms in the abortion debate,
has always been a curious fit. His campaign to protect the rights of women
and individuals from abuse by an authoritarian state shares more
philosophical D.N.A. with liberalism than with the religious right. In
that sense, Chen has always attracted an odd alliance of admirers, and
I’ve half-wondered if there won’t come a day when he will point out in his
relentlessly honest way that, actually, he is not in favor of policy that
deprives people of control over their own bodies.

But the case of Feng Jianmei is as much about state violence as it is
about abortion. And one of the remarkable things is that very similar
cases have happened for years. Seven years ago, I stood outside a
storefront in Shandong province, not far from Chen’s house, between a hair
salon and a fruit stand, as men and women locked up in the second floor of
the building shouted down to me that they had been detained by local
officials to force their relatives to undergo government-ordered
sterilizations and abortions. Either they consented, or the families had
to pay fines that ranged from three hundred and seventy to four hundred
and ninety dollars in order to be let go, nearly a year’s salary in that
area. For the local officials, it was a double boon: meeting local
population targets and making a profit as well.

Likewise, the Feng case is emblematic of some of the most inflammatory
issues on Chinese public life, beginning with money. In a country riven by
the widening gap between rich and poor, Feng and her husband, Deng Jiyuan,
were told they could avoid an abortion by paying the local equivalent of
sixty-four hundred dollars. “I told you, $6,400, not even a penny less. I
told your dad that and he said he has no money,” a family-planning
official wrote to Deng in a text message now public, and translated in a
good piece by Bo Gu at NBC
<http://behindthewall.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/06/14/12222877-gruesome-phot
os-put-spotlight-on-chinas-one-child-policy?lite>. “You were too careless,
you didn’t think this was a big deal.” (What accounts for a sum that is
nearly ten times as large as I found seven years ago? Hard to say, but
probably not all inflation; Feng’s case has transpired in an area with a
higher cost of living.)

What’s more, the family was being penalized because of the widely resented
“household registration” system, which acts a kind of domestic passport to
limit migration. Feng and her husband reportedly thought they were
entitled to a second child because many of their friends were (some rural
areas are less strict), but it turned out that Feng’s registration, or
hukou, was still tied to her former address in another province, so she
didn’t get the same exemptions to the one-child policy. The
house-registration system has been widely criticized for creating
something like an apartheid structure, which prevents people from gaining
equal access to schools, social services, and jobs.
Lastly, the case is a dramatic demonstration of exactly why the Communist
Party had reason to be afraid of the Internet: seven years ago, nobody in
that illegal-detention facility had access to the Web. Today, Feng’s
husband reportedly opened a Weibo account and uploaded the hospital-room
photos with his profile, along with an image of the text message. The fact
that it’s an iPhone
<http://www.theage.com.au/world/a-forced-abortion-for-a-mother-who-failed-t
o-sign-a-form-20120615-20eu6.html> only adds a surreal undertone to the
subject of discussion. Within days, a single case, one distinguishable and
atomized and unknown, became iconic.

By Friday, with the storm growing, Chinese officials issued a rare apology
and vowed to punish
<http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/15/us-china-abortion-idUSBRE85E08U2
0120615> the bureaucrats in charge. In America, the case will be
interpreted in political terms that we understand. But in China, it will
have a different color. It will be as much as anything about money,
freedom of movement, and the danger of a state that interferes in the most
private matters of life.