The US State Department has announced that it will stop contributing to the United Nations Population Fund on the grounds that it supports China’s unethical family planning polices, which include the practices of coercive abortion and involuntary sterilization. The State Department noted that the fund “partners on family planning activities with the Chinese government agency responsible for these coercive policies.”

Those policies have accounted for a tide of human suffering that has lasted for decades. A 2014 human rights report from the State Department stated that 336 million abortions and 222 million sterilizations had occurred in China since the beginning of the stringent family policies introduced in 1971, which led to the one-child policy in 1979. According to the World Health Organization, the rural areas of China have the highest female suicide rate in the world, and it is the only country listed where the number of suicides among women surpasses that of men. The one-child policy also led to a surge in female infanticide that has now resulted in a disastrous sex ratio of 115 boys to every 100 girls.