The brutality of China’s one-child policy is still shocking

So, China’s Communist Party has radically modified its one-child policy in favour of a one-or-two-child policy. For most politically minded Brits, it was a useful reminder that the policy actually existed. It has, says the Communist party with characteristic opacity, prevented about 400 million births in the decades since its introduction in 1979.  Some 330 million of those births were prevented by abortion. It may be that I somehow missed all the moral outrage over here at this flagrant violation of human rights from feminists and human rights organisations in those three decades. Or possibly there wasn’t much.

Maybe there were any number of women’s groups picketing the Chinese embassy about the policy on a 24-hour basis and I just never got to hear about it. There were obviously grounds for them to do so; not only were abortions routinely forced on reluctant couples by state family planning officials, the resulting, inevitable incidence of sex-selective abortions has resulted in 20 million missing girls – or is it 30 million; hard to tell – in the Chinese population now.