Media have been ablaze with hopeful reports that forced abortion and the “gendercide” of baby girls will now be ended in China. In fact, little has changed, except that instead of forcing Chinese families to have just one child, now that country’s totalitarian government will force them to have no more than two. This decision did not reflect any recognition by the Chinese Communist Party that parents have any right to control the size of their families, nor that women must be freed from forced abortions, much less that human life is sacred. Far from it. The Chinese generals and technocrats simply crunched the numbers and decided that they need more cannon and factory fodder to fuel that country’s expansion, so they issued a single order that a billion people must follow.

Human rights activists such as Stephen Mosher and Reggie Littlejohn have documented in heart-rending detail the results of the “one-child” policy adopted in 1980 by a Communist government terrified of “overpopulation” that might lead to its loss of absolute control over Chinese society. (That same government, just nine years later, would roll over student protesters with tanks in Tiananmen Square, to keep its iron grip on power.) A Chinese Communist official boasted that this policy had cut Chinese population growth by 400 million people, as of 2011. In a secretive dictatorship such as China, it is impossible to know how many of these casualties were the result of forced abortions.

A climate of fear and coercion has dominated Chinese family life for a generation, as informers and spies hunt down women with “illegal” pregnancies, and families desperate for at least one son to support them have resorted to sex selection abortion on a massive scale. According to Lifenews, in China, “more than 120 boys are born for every 100 girls. This has created a bachelor society of men who will be unable to marry and has given rise to more crime, sex trafficking, prostitution, and other problems.” China has the highest female suicide rate on earth.

As Congressman Chris Smith told Lifenews, China’s policy, which will remain in place for women after their second birth,

is unlike any other in the world in that it requires all women to obtain a birth permit before becoming pregnant and children of unwed mothers are subjected to abortions. And it monitors the reproductive cycles of all women of childbearing age through a system of mandatory, regular, and crudely invasive physical check-ups. …

“The brave pregnant woman who refuses to give in is usually detained and beaten – or, if she goes into hiding, her relatives are detained and beaten. Families that succeed in hiding an ‘out-of-plan’ pregnancy are punished with fines up to ten times the average annual income,” he explained.

In fact, however, Rep. Smith is missing something. China’s policy is not unprecedented. It is simply the implementation of a plan that was floated back in 1934. In America. By a female “progressive.” Her name was Margaret Sanger. In the depths of the Great Depression, the eugenics-obsessed elitist and libertine Sanger took advantage of the newfound hope which voters had placed in the New Deal’s big, federal agencies to propose that the U.S. government impose a centralized, coercive plan of government control over childbearing.

As Sanger wrote in “America Needs a Code for Babies”:

Article 1. The purpose of the American Baby Code shall be to provide for a better distribution of babies, to assist couples who wish to prevent overproduction of offspring and thus to reduce the burdens of charity and taxation for public relief, and to protect society against the propagation and increase of the unfit. …

Article 3. A marriage license shall in itself give husband and wife only the right to a common household and not the right to parenthood.

Article 4. No woman shall have the legal right to bear a child, and no man shall have the right to become a father, without a permit for parenthood. …

Article 6. No permit for parenthood shall be valid for more than one birth. …

Article 8. Feeble-minded persons, habitual congenital criminals, those afflicted with inheritable disease, and others found biologically unfit by authorities qualified judge should be sterilized or, in cases of doubt, should be so isolated as to prevent the perpetuation of their afflictions by breeding.

China followed Sanger’s plan to the letter — with the direct involvement of the Chinese branch of her own organization, Planned Parenthood, which helped to enforce the policy on the ground, shaking down peasants for crippling fines to punish “illegal” births. Since China’s mode of family planning has true-blue American roots, perhaps we shouldn’t be shocked when U.S. academics such as Sarah Conley of Bowdoin College defend China’s genocidal policy, and argue that it ought to prevail worldwide.

Are We Images of God, or Termites?

This isn’t a national question. It’s an anthropological question. There are two radically different ways to view human beings:

1. As creatures born to families, enfolded in communities but fundamentally free, conscious, responsible reflections of the holy image of God.
2. As hive insects, like termites, hatched into rigidly ruled colonies — whose work, life, and breeding are controlled by the queen (or elite) at the top, which alone understands what is best for the swarm of mindless workers and drones.

The first is the classical Christian picture of man, which came to fruition in the wake of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, when the full implications of our freedom and moral equality as sons of God made themselves most powerfully felt: Representative government flowered across the West, movements grew to abolish serfdom and slavery, and free economies unleashed the vast inventive power and productivity of ordinary people. The outcome? In dozens of countries the average lifespans increased by decades, and populations expanded, as famine and punishing scarcity became the exceptions, not the rule. For the first time, most parents could be sure they might feed their families, and fewer and fewer infants were carried off by disease.

The second view is that of elitists, who are deeply pessimistic about the dignity, worth, and capacity of most of the human race. Except for a chosen few (selected by race, ideology, or wealth), the vast majority of human beings are stumbling, self-harming serfs, whose lives need controlling by the select few who know better. This vision of human life found its full expression in totalitarian movements of the twentieth century, whose roots lay in nineteenth century pseudo-sciences such as racism, eugenics, and Marxist economics.

Today’s elitists, like yesterday’s, treat the Christian view with contempt, as a crude relic of the past that enables the clueless masses to follow their blind instincts. Lately we have learned that some psychologists are trying to label religious instruction of the young as a form of child abuse that could lead to loss of custody by parents, while other scientists are calling religious belief a form of mental illness that can be cured (we’re not making this up) by “treating” believers’ brains with magnets. Such methods may be what is needed to solve the profound ecological problems posed by the masses’ right to vote, which worries the richest man on earth, Bill Gates.

In fact, it is only the ancient Judeo-Christian picture of human rights that can protect us from modern and post-modern pseudo-science, and defend the rights of women to bear their own children and raise their own families — without the bloody-handed interference of distant men in white coats or military uniforms who conceive of themselves as members of some higher and wiser species, with the right to spay and neuter whomever they choose.