Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker has written a powerful commentary today on the appalling issue of forced abortion in China. Miss Parker interviewed Reggie Littlejohn, a women’s rights activist, who testified at yesterday’s hearings on Capitol Hill.
Reggie Littlejohn is a petite woman who heads Women’s Rights Without Frontiers. Attorney Littlejohn gave up a profitable practice to work for human rights.
Dr. Littlejohn showed how China’s brutal policy actually works. Women in China pregnant with their second or third “unauthorized” child, are rounded up and harassed until they submit to abortion--even in the eighth or ninth month. Estimates range as high as 50 million a year. China’s communist rulers claim it’s all voluntary. Littlejohn knows better. She provided congressional members of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission with incontrovertible evidence that forced abortion is official government policy and that it is widespread.
Dr. Littlejohn is calling upon Planned Parenthood and NARAL to speak up for the women of China who are daily denied their rights. She also hopes President Obama will raise the issue of human rights when he visits Asia this week.
What Reggie Littlejohn will learn is what Stephen Mosher learned more than 25 years ago. Steve Mosher was a young researcher from Stanford University. He was studying village life in rural China.
Then, Steve was “pro-choice.” But he discovered--in fact he was the first Westerner to discover--the way pregnant Chinese women were rounded up, thrown roughly into open trucks, hauled off to abortion centers by Communist Party cadres, and yelled at and stressed until they agreed to have abortions.
Steve was shocked by this denial of choice to these women. So he went public. He wrote about this story. He was promptly thrown out of China. And Beijing threatened Stanford University: If you want to send any more graduate students to China, you had better expel Steve Mosher. Stanford, you’ll remember, was the home of Jesse Jackson-led demonstrations in which student protestors chanted: “Hey hey, Ho ho, Western Civ has got to go.” Western Civilization was expelled from Stanford and so was Stephen Mosher. He was found to have violated rules passed by the Stanford faculty senate after he departed for China.
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