This portion of our project illustrates how women are discriminated against when they are born and when they give birth, due to a variety of factors:
In the convoluted course of Chinese history, finding an abandoned female
baby in the ditch was and is still no uncommon occurrence in China.
According to Liu Ping Yi, 2.5 % of female babies who should be born a year,
which is about a quarter of a million a year were missing due to abandonment
or infanticide. However, the subject of female infanticide and abandoned
girls is highly sensitive and figures have been unavailable in officially
released statistics. Since time immemorable, male babies have been valued
over female ones.
Traditionally, the family name is continued by the sons of the family and it
is a deep disgrace for one's family to die out after many generations. The
mother would be blamed for letting down the ancestors for her inability to
conceive a male child. Ironically, it is usually the matriarch who is the
most critical. This would often result in her husband taking another wife or
concubine and the mother being ostracised within the family.
One Child Policy
Economic Necessity
With the culmination of the Cultural Revolution and the start of Deng
Xiaoping's economic drive, China found itself in the cul-de-sac of economic
despair with insufficient material goods to sustain a swiftly multiplying
population. Hence, the advent of the population control policy known
worldwide as the "One Child Policy". Its goals were three pronged: first, to
reduce population growth, then raise the average standard of living which
would eventually improve political stability. However, in the twenty-plus
years that have passed since then, industrialised China has undergone
dramatic changes and the population control policy has tried - not very
successfully - to adapt itself to the shifting economic and social reality.
Nature of the policy
According to Human Rights in China (HRIC), couples have to apply for
shengyu zheng (birth permits) before they can start a pregnancy.
Though it has been called the "One Child Policy," the national average
target for births per couple has been 1.6, according to provincial
regulations (except for in Tibet) which had been adopted by the end of 1992.
One child is generally encouraged and advocated and another chance can be
given to rural couples, especially if their first child is a daughter. A
third is forbidden. After having the permitted number of children, women are
required to wear an IUD (intra-uterine device). Those who proceed with
unauthorized pregnancies, especially after they have already had one or the
permissible number of births, must have their pregnancies terminated. After
having an out-of-plan birth, one spouse must be sterilized.
The use of violence
Accounts of women forcibly kidnapped from their homes and then brutally
induced to have an abortion have been numerous. To those outside China, this
may all seem exaggerated but to the women involved, it is a living
nightmare. Perhaps, the use of violence can be attributed to social
officials under pressure to achieve birth quotas they had been allocated by
the central planning government.
The 1992 Law on the Protection of Women's Rights and Interests (LPWRI) bans
the use of violence against women and girls. But no enforcement mechanisms
were attached to the law, with violations still to be dealt with under the
existing Criminal Code.
Throughout the years, despite the cloak of secrecy that the central
authorities have tried to throw over the means they have taken to achieve
population control, reports have filtered out of brutalities committed by
officials whose job it was to detain women and force them to undergo
abortion, sterilisation or IUD insertion. Interferring husbands were beaten
up, property was confiscated and houses demolished. In some areas,
terrorising women and their families into submission has become a routine
job for population control officials.
In an interview with HRIC, one Chinese gynecologist, who worked in hospitals
in Beijing and in a provincial city between 1983 and 1993, told of how women
in late pregnancy are forced onto the operation table:
"...women who are 7, 8 or 9 months pregnant with their second or third
baby are taken to the hospital by regional population control officials for
induced abortion...Doctors and nurses in the delivery section are told that
when a woman is sent in by officials for induced abortion, her baby should
not be let out alive. Otherwise doctors or nurses will face administrative
discipline."
A former population control official who
worked in a township in a Northwestern province described the use of
violence by the team which he belonged to:
"...if the woman does not show up at the clinics on time [for abortion or
sterilisation], we go to her house trying to find her. If she is not home,
we go again at night, often with 4 or 5 tractor-loads of local militia or
police, each carrying a large flashlight. We go into the village quietly,
surround the woman's house and then knock on her door. When someone opens
the door we try to take the woman away...if we catch the woman, she is sent
to the township clinic to get sterilised in the middle of the night by
half-asleep nurses and doctors. The woman usually screams and kicks, and our
men hold her down for anaesthesia..."
Contraceptive Measures
It takes two for planned birth to be successful. In China, women not only
suffer the ordeal and side-effects of giving birth, they also bear a large
burden - in using contraceptives. As in many other parts of the world, birth
control policies have failed to emphasise on active participation. According
to the Women's Convention in China, in 1991, the male sterilisation rate was
only 12.1% of all using any method of contraceptives, but the female rate
was 38.39%, much higher than the world average for women at 26%. Overall,
only 16.49% of male partners use any contraceptives at all and 83.51% of
those using contraceptives are female. Rather than attributing this to any
religious reason like the Catholics who are against contraceptives (it is
against God's will), we attribute this to the male egoism of a patraichal
society. Using contraceptives or undergoing sterilisation is seen to be a
loss of virility and as such is considered by men to be an insult or loss of
face.
Consequently, male partners tend to be ignorant of reproductive issues and
contraceptives. According to a survey by the All-China Women's Federation
(ACWF), more than 10 percent of urban males held the view that abortion is a
method of contraception and that thus there is no reason to worry about
getting a female partner pregnant. When asked what measures they would take
to prevent subsequent pregnancies after their female partners had had
abortions, a significant number of husbands whose wives were having
abortions at Beijing Women's Hospital responded "no plan" or "my wife's
business, not mine." Most of them said they would ask their wives to be more
careful and use contraceptives. Some of the men had even won family planning
medals (for low birth rate) while their wives had multiple abortions.
Health effects
As a result of the strict birth control policy, "out-of-plan" women are
forced to have abortions even in the third trimester. Such an abortion poses
huge health risks, both physical and psychological, resulting in hemorrages,
incisions, infections, kidney problems and severe depression.
One Chinese woman described how doctors in a Xi'an hospital performed an
abortion on her when she was eight-and-a-half months pregnant:
"I was held down on the operating table. One doctor injected through my
belly into my uterus formaldehyde liquid...I knew my child was to die in a
few minutes...48 hours later, after being induced into labor, in front of a
room full of people, I gave birth to a live boy...He had a big head and
lovely legs and arms...but the doctors immediately killed him while I
watched helplessly. Then they took him out to be thrown away."
This woman has since developed depression. Whenever she recalls the scene of
her baby being killed in front of her, she says she cries uncontrollably.
In other cases, to avoid the stigma of having an "out-of-plan" baby, some
women abort their foetuses secretly, forgoing any medical leave they would
have been entitled to. The lack of rest after abortion can also cause
several serious medical consequences. Other women determined to carry
"illegal" children to term, may give birth under unsanitary conditions
without proper medical assistance. Sterilisation is by no means a safe
procedure. Overworked doctors racing to complete steep quotas dictated by
the authorities often "only have time to change gloves during operations".
Practical Prejudices
In rural areas, where the output of a farm depends solely on family labour.
Having a girl would be disadvantageous as naturally she would unable to work
as hard as a boy would. When of a mariageble age, a girl would then have to
work at her husband's farm. Her parents, by then older and less able, would
be bereft of any assistance at all. This often made farms unproductive. In
the early years of the one child policy, instances of female infanticides
and abandonment of girls shot up. As a result, some 18 provinces have
allowed couples to have a second child if the first is a girl. This however,
is a double-edged sword. Women are able to have two children without
undergoing forced abortion. However, this same legislation also demeans the
status of women as it is an official recognition of sexual discrimination.