China's Forced Abortions Increase Trafficking

China's one child family planning policy, which has often been criticized as forced abortions, has led to a gender gap which may increase human trafficking in the region.

China's strict one-child-per-family policy was implemented to keep the population in check, but has resulted in the government forcing thousands upon thousands of pregnant women to get abortions against their will.  According to a recent story on NPR, 

Liang Yage and his wife Wei Linrong had one child and believed that — like many other couples — they could pay a fine and keep their second baby. Wei was 7 months pregnant when 10 family planning officials visited her at home on April 16.

The couple goes on to descibe being forced to go to the hospital, where Wei Linrong was given injections to terminate her pregnancy, depsite her refusal to sign a consent form.  Such a policy is not only cruel and inhumane on a personal level, but it has resulted in the gendercide of millions of baby girls, leaving a vast gender gap in the millenial generation.

Now, an estimated 30 million Chinese men may not be able to marry, for lack of women their age.  Sadly, the answer to this issue has increasingly been to traffic women from other Asian countries into China.  In the past several years, human trafficking of women and girls for sex and marriage into China has increased.  And if the one-child policy continues and the gender gap grows, human trafficking will surely grow with it.    

This is one more sad example of how one human rights violation often leads to another, and policies that are intended to increase social stability at the cost of personal freedom, when they ignore basic rights, will ultimately fail.