By Dave Andrusko

Please send your comments on either Part One or Part Two to daveandrusko@gmail.com. If you'd like, follow me at www.twitter.com/daveha.

Part Two today comes from the office of pro-life Cong. Chris Smith. It is a follow up to a hearing conducted Tuesday on human rights abuses in China which include the barbarity of forced abortion and sterilization. This makes for a very sobering backdrop as pro-abortion President Barack Obama prepares for a visit to China.

Chen Guangcheng is serving a four-year sentence after exposing 130,000 forced abortions and sterilizations in Linyi County, Shandong province, in 2005.

"Few people outside China understand what a massive and cruel system of social control the one-child policy entails," Smith, a defender of human rights around the world, said. Speaking as one of the congressional members of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, Smith outlined how the Chinese government is abusing women and up-ending the traditional Chinese family.

"As the U.S. China Commission summarized, the system is 'marked by pervasive propaganda, mandatory monitoring of women's reproductive cycles, mandatory contraception, mandatory birth permits, coercive fines for failure to comply, and, in some cases, forced sterilization and abortion,'" he said.

Reggie Littlejohn, of Women's Rights Without Frontiers, testified, "This is the worst violence against women in human history." This is no exaggeration, as you see if you read Part Two in conjunction with an op-ed that appears in today's Washington Post: "When Abortion Isn't a Choice," by Kathleen Parker. [www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/10/AR2009111013891.htm]

There is no way for us in safe, secure America to imagine the sheer horror or the magnitude of the Chinese government's assault on families. Parker, no pro-lifer, reminds us that the coercive policy continues, despite what apologists for Chinese officialdom insist.

"While the Chinese Communist Party insists that abortions are voluntary under the nation's one-child policy," she writes, "electronic documentation recently smuggled out of the country tells a different story."

And this is not going away soon. She quotes from the state-run news agency which in July quoted officials of China's National Population and Family Planning Commission as saying that the one-child policy "will be strictly enforced as a means of controlling births for decades to come."

And for those who like to console themselves with the thought that these are abortions performed "early," the witnesses remind us that there is no stage at which an "unauthorized" pregnancy cannot be "terminated."

"Late-term abortions are problematic," Parker writes, "but the Chinese are nothing if not efficient. On one Web site for Chinese obstetricians and gynecologists, doctors recently traded tips in a dispassionate discussion titled: 'What if the infant is still alive after induced labor?' ChinaAid provided a translation of a thread regarding an eight-month-old fetus that survived the procedure.

"'Xuexia' wrote: 'Actually, you should have punctured the fetus' skull.' Another poster, 'Damohuyang,' wrote that most late-term infants died during induced labor, some lived and 'would be left in trash cans. Some of them could still live for one to two days.'"

Since I do really want you to read Parker's op-ed and Part Two, let me make just one more point. Both Parker and others insisted that no one--pro-life or "pro-choice"--believes in forced abortion.

Perhaps in the abstract, that is true. But as read the responses on the webpage of the Post you see there are people who can talk themselves into justifying forced abortion as the least worse option. Congressional defenders tend to be more creative: they simply deny that it is going on, or, more often, deny that U.S. dollars are directly or indirectly subsidizing these ugly policies.

There is a kind of brutal irony that this hearing should take place a few days after the death of Nien Cheng, author of "Life and Death in Shanghia," a mesmerizing best-selling account of what Washington Post reporter Michael Laris describes as "one of the 20th century's great spasms of political insanity and violence [that] unfolded in Mao Zedong's China," which we know as the "Great Cultural Revolution."

While she was imprisoned on trumped up charges, Cheng's daughter was murdered, although authorities insisted it was a suicide. Cheng's courage and defiant resistance in the face of totalitarian power is humbling.

I immediately thought of Cheng and her unforgettable book when I read this passage from Parker's account.

"The violence of these [abortion] procedures doesn't only kill the child in some instances. In two of the cases described in a document leaked this past August, the mothers died, too. Those who dissent, meanwhile, are persecuted. Such has been the fate of activist Chen Guangcheng, who is serving a four-year sentence after exposing 130,000 forced abortions and sterilizations in Linyi County, Shandong province, in 2005. Named by Time magazine as one of 2006's top 100 people 'who shape our world,' Guangcheng, who is blind, was severely beaten and denied medical care the following year, according to an Amnesty International report."

Parker concludes with a quote from Littlejohn who hopes Obama will "truly represent American values, including our strong commitment to human rights." Don't know what the chances of that are, although I wouldn't wager the farm on it.

But Littlejohn "is also calling on Planned Parenthood and NARAL to speak up for reproductive choice in China." What do you think the odds of that are?

Send your thoughts and comments to daveandrusko@gmail.com.

Part Two