Never say that NPR doesn't warn before it disturbs. On Morning Edition--after a warning about the nature of the story--I listened to something has been reported elsewhere in the international press but has not surfaced (to my knowledge) elsewhere in the U.S. media:
During the past week, dozens of women in southwest China have been forced to have abortions even as late as nine months into the pregnancy, according to evidence uncovered by NPR.
China's strict family planning laws permit urban married couples to have only one child each, but in some of the recent cases — in Guangxi Province — women say they were forced to abort what would have been their first child because they were unmarried. The forced abortions are all the more shocking because family planning laws have generally been relaxed in China, with many families having two children.
The story was terrifying. Women who had been judged unfit to have a baby--whether because they already had one child or because they were unmarried, as the report described--were forcibly taken to area hospitals and made to have abortions. In one case described in the report, a teenage mother only days away from delivery was forced to get an abortion. A witness quoted in the report said that on one floor of one hospital alone, 41 beds were occupied by women who appeared to have been forced to abort.
There are no words sufficient to describe the horror I felt in hearing this. Somehow, after having a baby, these kinds of stories hit on a visceral level that they never did before. But I want to be clear about something: This violation of women a world away is simply the other side of a storm that is on its way in our own country. If the government can force a person to have a baby--as is the case in societies in which women do not have access to safe, reliable birth control and legal abortions--the state can just as easily decide at some later date that it has the right to decide who cannot have a baby.
Maybe on some level, deep down where we live, we might feel such restrictions are common sense. After all, I've said many times that it's crazy that a 16-year-old needs to take classes and pass various tests to become a driver but can become a parent simply by making bad choices. The way that reproductive capabilities are apportioned out sometimes seems like a cruel joke. But that's not a power we should give the government, even more than we should allow the government to force someone to become a mother.
It's two sides of the same coin, people. Government control over women's bodies can go both ways, and the numerous Americans celebrating the "end" of certain abortion procedures would do well to remember that.
