China’s One Child Policy, which often involves forcing women to have abortions against their will, must rank as one of the most barbaric social policies anywhere in the world. Even if you support abortion it is an appalling attack on women’s genuine reproductive rights.

Chinese writer Ma Jian, in this piece in the Guardian, points out that, while China’s totalitarian government “may have relaxed its control of the means of production”, it has “maintained firm control of the means of reproduction”.

This policy is enforced with the utmost brutality, Jian says:

“In 2007, I read of riots breaking out in Bobai County in China’s south-western Guangxi province. Under pressure from higher authorities to meet birth targets, local officials had launched a vicious crackdown on family-planning violators. Squads had rounded up 17,000 women and subjected them to sterilisations and abortions and had extracted 7.8m yuan (£800,000) in fines for ‘illegal births’, ransacking the homes of families who refused to pay.”

This is an abuse of human rights on an epic scale.

Meanwhile, ‘reproductive rights’ organisations like the American-based Centre for Reproductive Rights (CRR) seem more interested in human rights ‘abuses’ in Ireland than in China. Currently they are devoting attention to the fact that Irish law prohibits aborting infants simply because they are fatally handicapped.

The CRR has devoted some of its attention to China’s horrible policy, but given the scale of the human rights abuses there, it needs to devote a lot more of its attention to the matter. As does the Irish Government come to think of it.