She is 41 and eight-months pregnant with a healthy baby she is considering killing. Because she lives in China and has a child already, “Chen” says she may abort her second child so she can save her husband’s job as a police officer.
Despite public outcry and outrage over the situation, Chen says abortion is an option, though it appears the possible abortion may be forced. The New York Post reports:
“I’m fearful,” Chen said. “If my husband believes I must abort the child, there’s nothing I can do.”
The Post continues:
She also grew uneasy about the public attention her case was drawing. “I am worried he would lose his job even after we lose the baby, if the situation gets messy.”
Chen said the couple had hoped for a policy change that would allow them to have a second child but found her unexpectedly pregnant earlier this year in violation of the current rule.
China is infamous for its one-child policy, and although it’s been relaxed a little so some parents may have two children, “urban parents who are not only children themselves still can have only one child, as in the case of Chen and her husband.”
Although Chen expresses a no-win scenario, the fact is, her husband has reportedly been offered a job by an online travel service if he loses his job with the Chinese government. But as the Post says:
The case has rekindled debate over whether employment in the public sector should be used to enforce the policy that limits urban couples to one child in cases where both husband and wife have at least one sibling.
Wen Xueping, a family planning official in Yunnan’s Chuxiong prefecture, said the couple will not be forced to abort the baby but have been warned of the consequences of having it. Couples who violate the child policy face hefty fines and — if they have government jobs — face being sacked.
“No way will we force them to have an abortion,” Wen said. “But there also is the suspicion that the couple wants to avoid the punishment for breaking the rules by stirring up public interest.”
But of course there is a history of forced abortion in China, and that’s not a stretch for anyone who knows the abortion-happy nation’s policies.
In 2012, there was an international outcry at the forced abortion of a mother’s six-month-old baby. Officials were punished, and the promise of an end to forced abortion followed, but even a year later, forced abortions were being reported in the nation.
With a culture hellbent on the deaths of babies, women are made to feel like criminals for being pregnant, and culture is ripe with the scent of death. Whether or not the abortion-driven nation would physically force Chen to have an abortion is almost irrelevant in this climate.
What’s troubling is that Chen feels no human right to bear her own child when she says that if her husband wants to abort, there is nothing she can do. Yet there is. The public outcry she has created could lend itself to the right kind of pressure to stop this abortion, as could the job offer her husband has received. The idea that Chen talking about her situation may be a way to avoid “punishment,” as the government family-planning official says, is a sick testament to the reality in this oppressive nation.
Even pro-choicers would recognize that her baby is viable now. There should be no need to stir up publicity to avoid the death of a baby that old, but China clearly has no respect for women or for children. Its best defense is to criticize the pregnant couple for using their plight for publicity.
The argument that a woman feels she must preserve her family’s financial life with abortion is an argument straight from Planned Parenthood’s podium. A woman should not be forced to have a child if she can’t afford it, the abortion giant says.
And now China shows us the lengths to which that reasoning can go.
It’s unclear why, at this point, the nation won’t allow Chen to give her baby up for adoption so at least the baby could live. And it’s telling that Chen uses language such as “if we lose the baby.” The only way the baby will be “lost” is if he or she is put to a painful and tragic death for the sake of a job and a nation that has shown what abortion does to the value of life.
Meanwhile, Chen has garnered public outcry, and her husband does have a job offer on the table. The question will come down to the value of their baby’s life and if she’s worth more than money. China says no, but as long as the baby is still in the womb alive, these parents can still say yes.
