‘If I was born a girl I would have been put in a basket and sent away’ – One Child Nation Documentary
Content warning: this article mentions topics on abortions, female infanticide, and human trafficking.
It’s not often you hear the horror stories of new-borns being left on the side of the road, suffocating in a tied-up bin bag in a dump, or being found wedged in the pipes of a building. But this was the everyday reality for 35 years in China.
On September 25th, 1980, the Communist Party of The People’s Republic of China issued a law permitting families to having only one child. What followed from this can only be described as a tragedy that China can never be recover from.
In an attempt to take control of the rapid increase in birth rates, The National Family Planning committee used propaganda to encourage and promote later marriages, and the benefits of having fewer children. But it seemed this wasn’t enough, and Government Officials instead turned to actions of inhumanity, exposing the uglier side of China’s war against overpopulation.
Women who refused to have an abortion would be dragged from their beds in the middle of the night and forced to have one anyway. Afterwards, they would be sterilised.
In a documentary called ‘One Child Nation’, a midwife from a rural area of China admits that she performed around 60 thousand forced abortions and sterilisations. She recounted how she was forced to kill the new-born babies of the mothers she had helped get pregnant 9 months before. Because they were born a girl.
China has always favoured and valued male descendants over females as a result of the Confucian Legacy. So, when the programme was implemented across the country, parents were desperate for a boy, and would go to any and every extent possible to achieve this.
If a couple gave birth to a girl, they would pack her in a box and leave her for dead, stating that she was stillborn to the government officials.
If a baby was lucky enough to be rescued, she would be placed outside the doors of an orphanage. But, as a result of the overwhelming number of abandoned girls, orphanage workers would be forced to choose which babies to take inside the gates of the orphanage, leaving the others to die on the street. In other cases, the baby would be sold for money.
The Missing Girls of China: it is estimated that around 10 to 15 million women have been missing since 1982. Some were lucky enough to have been adopted abroad. Others have simply vanished.
The One-Child Policy ended 28 years too late: In 2016, the One-Child Policy came to an end. The consequence of the programme has and will continue to have a detrimental impact on China’s economic stability, marital rates, and birth rates because there are not enough girls. It has been estimated that by 2050, for every 110 males there are 100 females.
What was intended as a resolution to the imminent dangers of China’s population crisis is slowly backfiring on itself, resulting in consequences that are quite possibly irreversible.
One Child Nation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMcJVoLwyD0