Chinese Women Supporter Jailed

A local Chinese court has upheld the bogus sentence of a leading opponent of forced abortions who was charged with destroying property and disrupting traffic in a protest he never attended. Chen Guangcheng's attorneys protested what they called a politically motivated court ruling.....

Chen and his family came under intense persecution following his interviews with Time and the Washington Post about a brutal family planning campaign conducted in the eastern city of Linyi.

There, local officials forced as many as 10,000 women to undergo abortions or sterilizations and jailed or harassed family members who refused to turn in women targeted in the campaign.

Chen, who taught himself law though he has been blind since childhood, was organizing a class-action lawsuit against the government at the time his persecution began.

From: China Court Upholds Forced Abortion Opponent's Bogus Sentence by Steven Ertelt of LifeNews.com

Forced abortions have been performed in China for many years. Concerned about a large population, the government had forbidden the more numerous ethnic groups in China to have more than one child. This led to the monitoring of women's monthly cycles in some areas and brutal forced abortions perpetrated on young women who whether on purpose or by accident became pregnant after already giving birth to a child.

Another outcome was the institutionalization of baby girls by their parents in orphanages where they may or may not thrive so women could try for a boy in a nation in which males are traditionally prized more highly than females and are needed in more rural regions for physical work and to care for parents in old age.

I have had discussions with self-identified liberals about this very issue and was stunned to discover that they could not condemn forced abortions as evil or immoral. Where were the cries for human rights on behalf of Chinese women? Population control and multi-culturalism trumped women's rights in their minds. These were not uneducated people either. Even when I tried to describe it in graphic terms just to get the point across, thinking they weren't grasping the ramification of such a policy---"So, you're saying that you really have no problem with a local government monitoring a woman's monthly cycle, and upon discovering that she's pregnant, coming into her home, forcibly taking her somewhere, strapping her down, shoving medical instruments into her body and forcibly and painfully evacuating a baby from her uterus without her consent?"--- and the answer was "No. No problem."

Well, alrighty then. (Shudder)

Apparently, attempts to challenge the authority of the government to brutalize women (and unborn babies) result in persecution too.

I don't know if the higher court can overturn this lower courts ruling yet again, but God bless Chen Guangcheng for his fearless fight for the rights and protection of women in his country.