Showing on Amazon Prime is “One Child Nation”, a deeply disturbing excursion into the cruelties of Communist Chinese social engineering. Social engineering is the sine qua non of communism. An allegedly wise cadre of elite apparatchiks sit on top of a society and pronounce from the summit measures to bring about the better world, as they are totally uncaring and devoid of understanding of the unintended consequences. And for Communist China, the one-child policy is replete with state-manufactured horrors.
Don’t expect the host/narrator to endorse the pro-life position, though. She doesn’t, in a rather befuddling way. She equates in a perfunctory fashion the grotesqueries of the Communist policy with US and our state governments’ actions to restrict abortion. Both are nonsensically lumped together in her mind as government attempts to “control a woman’s body”. Don’t let that dissuade you from seeing the film if you are pro-life. There’s enough in it to soil the entire concept of abortion and the social engineering endemic to an assumed omni-competent state, the kind that would be erected by Bernie or Joe. The two differ only in scale.
From 1979 to 2015, the CCP enforced a 1.0 birth rate on the whole country. It was barbarous both in its implementation and results. In 2015, the potentates pulled another number out of their hat: 2.0.
Abortion weighs heavy in the story, along with forced sterilizations, the killing of babies who survived the procedure, and the lingering psychological scars from participation in the campaign. The malefactors even received awards for their “service”. One Chinese artist in the 1990’s was shocked into opposition when he discovered fetuses (or babies, depending on your preference) in yellow and green plastic bags marked with “Medical Waste” in garbage dumps and landfills.
The demography of China became tilted toward males as the females were aborted or abandoned to die, all due to a Chinese cultural bias in favor of the males. Older people many years later were in tears reminiscing on leaving a baby in a box alone in the countryside or street, fearful of the repercussions for exceeding the quota. Abandonment supplied the wherewithal for an new international adoption industry, much of the proceeds lining the pockets of government apparatchiks. What happens when an entire population of over a billion is so emotionally scarred?
Like it or not, the film doesn’t skirt the issue of the legitimacy of abortion very skillfully. If Sen. Charles Schumer had seen the flick, he might not had been so enthusiastic in his threats to a couple of pro-life-leaning jurists. What he and, ironically, the film’s host ignore is the first question at root in the dispute: Is the entity in the womb (and all of us were an “entity in the womb”) a human being? If “yes”, euthanizing a prenatal baby is an act of killing. No amount of a person’s “control of their body” can atone for the immorality. If “no”, the fetus is the equivalent of a tumor. The Chinese artist puts the “no” position in an awkward spot when he displays dead pre-natal babies suspended in jars of formalin. They look like my two sons at their birth; only these are dead.
See the film, but ignore the self-contradictory commentary at a short juncture at the end. Whether forced or not, the flick puts abortion in a bad light. If you’re pro-choice, abortion shouldn’t be construed as a sacrament, as some hard-core activists screeched outside the Supreme Court. Whether it’s legal or not, it’s still a horrible thing. No mistake about it.
RogerG