Just as the UK debated the need for a new law to prevent abortion based on gender, the Chinese Government announced its latest population statistics. (1)The report contains the admission that gender imbalance among newborns in China is 'the most serious and prolonged' in the world. (2) At the end of 2014, there were nearly34 million fewer women than men in China.This massive imbalance is a result of three decades of the one-child policy, the practice of sex-selective abortions and the traditional belief that only men can continue the family bloodline.
Every year, about 13 million registered abortions are carried out in China. That equates to 35,000 abortions per day. A further one million babies are abandoned every year, mostly healthy girls. On average, 116 boys are born for every 100 girls (the natural sex ratio is 105:100). This figure masks the fact that six provinces have sex ratios of over 130:100 in the 1–4 age group. (3) It is predicted that by 2030 25% of Chinese men in their late 30s will never have married.
The presence of 'excess males' is also one of the main driving forces behind human trafficking and sexual slavery, not only in China but in surrounding nations as well.A US Department of State report states that women are trafficked into China from neighbouring countries for prostitution and forced labour, while Chinese women are trafficked from rural areas to urban centres. (4)
The problems don't stop there. China is the only nation in the world where more women commit suicide than men, and has the highest female suicide rate of any country in the world. According to a US Department of State human rights report, the number of female suicides in China has risen to a staggering 590 per day. (5) But statistics can hide the fact that behind each number are millions of individual women. We only hear a few of those stories because they are hidden and suppressed by China's regime.
The UK is complicit in these issues. Western governments fund (through our taxes) the United Nations Population Fund and the International Planned Parenthood Federation. Both have worked hand in hand with the coercive Chinese population control machine for decades. There is no apparent will from our government to close down such funding, let alone pressurise the Chinese Government to stop gender abortions. If we refuse to make clear that it is illegal here, on what moral grounds can we insist it is wrong in China?
