A decision by China to allow couples to have two children instead of one won't stop the horrors of population control through forced abortions, forced sterilization and infanticide, a longtime critic of the one-child policy charges.
Cai Fang, a vice director of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who advises the government on birth control policies, said China will "fully relax the policy" in two years and allow all couples to have a second child, Bloomberg News reported.
But Reggie Littlejohn, whose Womens Rights Without Frontiers has lobbied against the policy in the United Nations, said allowing couples to have a second child is hardly a "full relaxation" of the policy.
"The problem with the one-child policy is not the number of children 'allowed.' Rather, it is the fact that the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) is telling women how many children they can have and then enforcing that limit through forced abortion, forced sterilization and infanticide," she said.
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"Even if all couples were allowed two children, there is no guarantee that the CCP will cease their appalling methods of enforcement," said Littlejohn. "Women will still need a birth permit to have their first and second child. Women who get pregnant without permission will still be dragged out of their homes, strapped down to tables and forced to abort babies that they want, even up to the ninth month of pregnancy."
Bloomberg said China is easing the policy because its shrinking labor pool is forecast to slash the growth rate by 6.2 percent annually from 2016 to 2020.
"People wish to choose the number of children they want to have, and they should be given the choice, at least for two children," Fang said in the report.
Chinese President Xi Jinping said last year that some additional families would be allowed to have a second child, but the government said not even 3 percent of those eligible asked for permission. Of the 690,000 couples who did ask, permission was granted for 620,000, officials said.
The U.N. estimates that women in China have 1.66 babies, while a ratio of 2.1 is needed to sustain a population.
"The Chinese Communist Party is finally waking up to the fact that, by instituting the brutal one-child policy for economic reasons 34 year ago, it unwittingly signed its own economic death warrant," Littlejohn said.
"China will grow old before it grows rich. China's population problem is not that it has too many people, but that it has too few young people."
WND reported in March Littlejohn's warning to the U.N. that the policy change is only a "minor adjustment."
See the campaign aimed at ending forced abortion and the petition.
At that time, China said it would allow a family a second child if either parent is an only child. Previously both parents had to be only children.
She told the U.N. that while women on many countries are mistreated, "only in China are women dragged out of their homes and forcibly aborted and sterilized by their government."
"China's one-child policy causes more violence against pregnant women than any other official policy on earth and any other official policy in the history of the world," she said. "Forced abortion is official government rape."
Littlejohn pointed out that areas of China where two children currently are allowed are especially vulnerable to "gendercide," the sex-selective abortion of females.
Because of the gendercide, an estimated 37 million Chinese men will never marry.
"This gender imbalance is a powerful, driving force behind trafficking in women and sexual slavery, not only in China, but in neighboring nations as well," she said.
Littlejohn said the Chinese Communist Party is keeping "coercion" at the core of its population control plans.
"It should be called China's 'Forced Abortion Policy,'" she said. "Those who care about women and girls must continue to press with persistence until forced abortion and gendercide are eradicated from the face of the earth."
She said China's forced-abortion policy "does not need to be modified."
"It needs to be abolished."
See Women's Rights Without Frontiers explain "gendercide," the practice of killing selected unborn because of their gender:
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