On the recordJanuary 22, 2013
I thank the gentleman for yielding and for raising that important issue. The People's Republic of China doesn't have a pro-life movement per se. The government is a dictatorship. Regrettably, going back to 1979, they enacted with great push and encouragement from the United States and from the West, Europe especially, a one-child-per-couple policy where brothers and sisters are illegal, where women are systematically, forcibly aborted, and forced sterilization is commonplace to achieve quotas. Not only does a woman have to get a birth authorization from the Government of China to have a baby; if she has an out-of-plan birth, she is aborted forcibly. Over the years, as chairman of the China Commission and as chairman of the Human Rights Committee of the Foreign Affairs Committee, I've chaired 43 congressional hearings on human rights in China; and many of those were focused on, as you pointed out, women who had to be behind screens to tell their story about the gross indignity, the exploitation, the crimes against humanity that had been committed against them. In China today, there are approximately 100 million, maybe more, missing daughters, the direct consequence of sex-selection abortion and what is often referred to as gendercide, the deliberate killing of a little girl simply because she is a girl.…
