Though China’s oppressive One-Child Policy has been relaxed to a (no less oppressive) Two-Child Policy, the pressure to abort female children remains high.
In 2015, Women’s Rights Without Frontiers president Reggie Littlejohn noted that this would be the case:
A two-child policy will not end any of the human rights abuses caused by the One Child Policy, including forced abortion, involuntary sterilization or the sex-selective abortion of baby girls. Nor will it “dismantle” the extensive infrastructure of coercion necessary to implement population control in China.
Case in point: The South China Morning Post reports this week that a mother has died after being coerced to abort four baby girls because her husband wanted their second child to be a son. The couple already has one living daughter, who is four years old, and decided to have a second child following the Chinese government’s updated family planning policy.
After the woman became ill as a result of multiple abortions, her husband chose to divorce her. The woman received the equivalent of $2500 USD in the divorce settlement and sought treatment for her illnesses at a hospital, but did not survive. The report does not state how long the woman was hospitalized before she died.
The Post states that the woman “came from a county near Wuhu in Anhui province,” and had learned of each baby’s sex “through X-rays.”
The woman’s ex-husband is reportedly already planning to marry another woman.
