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Others have explored the horrific implications of this policy. Nine years ago, The Economist provided the shocking statistic that 100 million baby girls had been aborted, killed after birth, abandoned or sold to child trafficking gangs who then sell the babies to foreigners for large sums of money.
Many writers describe the horror. Not as many honestly discuss how China got to the point where babies could be drowned in buckets of water; strangled with their own umbilical cord; tossed into dumpsters and waterways; or thrown, newly born, into public streets, where they were ignored by passersby and left to cry and die of exposure — that is, if they were not run over by vehicles. And then there were the forced abortions — even of full-term babies — and the brutal sterilizations of women.
When confronted with abject evils like those described above, it is so tempting to assume that the human beings responsible for the design and implementation of those policies did so specifically to cause evil. But this is almost never the case. To the contrary, policies like China's — and the diabolical practices by which those policies are enforced — are almost always pitched as a mechanism for achieving good.
But in order to obtain widespread buy-in to such abject deceit, it is absolutely necessary to ensure that there is no ultimate definition of good — no absolute standard by which "good" and "evil" can be evaluated independently of what the public is told to believe.
No doubt there are plenty of historical, political and even cultural reasons why millions of babies were aborted, abandoned after birth or deliberately killed. But the overarching reason is that the Chinese government set itself up as God. There can be no authority higher than that of the humans in control, no objectives better than the policies they themselves dictate and no criteria by which the "goodness" of those objectives is independently assessed. The government has decided that X should be done, and, therefore, X is good and shall be done. Any means by which X is achieved is, therefore, also good — as long as the government says so. This is how the government could order the Chinese people to perpetrate inhuman crimes against the most innocent, and the Chinese people would do it.
We are sooooo close here in the United States, too. So close that abortion activists can almost taste it.
Just look at the evolution of abortion — particularly the language used by activists — and what is happening to those who seek to expose the truth about it.
Back when abortion was legalized by the U.S. Supreme Court opinion Roe. v. Wade, abortion activists like NARAL Pro-Choice America and Planned Parenthood could get away with lies and euphemisms, assuring a largely ignorant public that unborn children were just "clumps of cells" and "products of conception."
The invention of ultrasound made the old lies much more difficult. During President Bill Clinton's administration, Democrats were calling for abortion to be "safe, legal and rare." But that suggested that abortion was somehow less than desirable. That would never do. Abortion activists changed their tack and went on offense. Now we see efforts to persuade the public that abortion is a good thing. First there was the "Shout Your Abortion" movement. This past week, Planned Parenthood tweeted: "Abortion is MORAL. It is IMPORTANT. It is HEALTH CARE."
These are lies of breathtaking scope, worthy of China's one-child propaganda machine, Nazi mastermind Joseph Goebbels or George Orwell:
War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
Abortion is moral.
Planned Parenthood has become aggressive and brazen. It is no longer enough to tolerate abortion, or to use rare and sympathetic cases like conception following rape or incest, or gross fetal abnormalities to argue for abortion's legality. Now the line is that killing your own children is the moral thing to do.
Facts that prove the "narrative" wrong are ignored — or worse. When the story of the gruesome practices in abortionist (and convicted murderer) Kermit Gosnell's butcher shop came to light (practices that would have been right at home in 1980s China), abortion activists simply ignored it. (And the media helped cover it up.)
Perhaps the most shocking facts that have come to light about the abortion industry are the reports of sales of baby body parts for money — and the callousness of those involved in the abortion and dismemberment of fetuses whose body parts could be sold. Undercover journalist and pro-life activist David Daleiden exposed this to the public four years ago in a series of video recordings of conversations with abortion doctors and other clinic employees and technicians.
Did Daleiden receive the hero's welcome that we're told whistleblowers deserve?
Hardly.
First, a judge ordered the videos banned. Then, Daleiden and his partner Sandra Merritt were charged in California under the RICO statute (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act) — legislation that was passed to prosecute the Mafia. Last week, a California jury found Daleiden and Merritt guilty of conspiracy to commit fraud, trespassing and illegal recording, and awarded Planned Parenthood over $2 million in damages. Another criminal trial is beginning in December.
Not only are the abortion doctors demanding that we see abortion as moral; anyone who dares tell the real truth will be tried and convicted. Because the truth is whatever Planned Parenthood says it is.
Just like China.
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Laura Hirschfeld Hollis is on the faculty at the University of Notre Dame, where she teaches courses in business law and entrepreneurship. She has received numerous awards for her teaching, research, community service and contributions to entrepreneurship education.