It’s been over three weeks since Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng’s daring escape from house arrest made first made New York Times headlines, and the controversy and coverage surrounding the event have grown exponentially. The Guangcheng affair has not only sparked a rift in US-China relations; it has also become an election-year issue after Mitt Romney declared the Obama administration’s response a "dark day for freedom, and a day of shame for the Obama administration."

The domestic and international politics surrounding Chen’s story are complex and interesting in their own right. But beneath the headlines, another, more consequential story is being missed: the chilling details of a massive assault on reproductive freedom taking place in China.

Chen, a long-time activist, first  came under fire from authorities in Linyi province after he exposed a widespread campaign of forced abortions and sterilizations being waged mostly against women (in China, 8.9 percent of men have had sterilization surgery, compared to 37.6 percent of women). The campaign, taking place under the auspices of China’s one-child policy, aims at stabilizing and reducing the country’s population of roughly 1.3 billion.  

Top-down population control programs around the world have drawn harsh criticism from thoughtful feminists and reproductive rights advocates for some time, but the scale of China’s coercive family initiative sets it apart.  A report, compiled from Chen Gaungcheng’s notes and released on the internet by Women’s Rights Without Frontiers (an organization whose politics are ambiguous but has worked closely with Gaungcheng), notes that there were 130,000 forced abortions and sterilizations in Linyi in 2005 alone.

Numbers that big are hard to fathom – roughly the equivalent of coercively sterilizing the entire population of Savannah, Georgia in one year – and of course, the data from Linyi tells us nothing about how pervasive it was – or is – throughout the rest of China.

Each of these 130,000 stories is personal, and the details are often horrifying. Take the story of Yeqing Ji, which she shared at a Congressional hearing in November 2011:

When she became pregnant again in 2006, Ji said local authorities confronted her and told her she was breaking the law.

"We were willing to take the punishment of fines and losing our jobs. It wasn't as important to us as our child," she said through a translator.

This time, the authorities refused payment in fines and "dragged" her outside and beat her husband. Ji said she was sedated and the abortion was performed while she was unconscious. They had also installed an intrauterine device into her uterus after the abortion and told her she was responsible for its cost. Ji, now 35, had the device removed in the U.S., but her doctor found cervical erosion that will hinder her ability to have children.

"After the abortion, I felt empty, as if something was scooped out of me. My husband and I had been so excited for our new baby. Now, suddenly, all that hope and joy and excitement had disappeared, all in an instant," she said.

Another aspect of China’s one-child policy that often goes unnoticed is its connection to eugenics. China’s Law on Population and Birth Planning clearly states that the one-child policy aims at the "enhancement…of the quality of China's population.” As Mara Hvistendahl details in her book Unnatural Selection, many of these coercive family planning efforts target girls, resulting in a birth ratio unnaturally skewed in favor of men.   Also targeted are persons with disabilities. According to public policy scholars Heidi Fjeld and Gry Sagli, "the policy of prevention of impairment has been...powerfully enforced as an essential component of the national 'one child policy.”

Unfortunately, in-depth coverage of these stories has been largely passed over by media outlets in favor of the political hullabaloo surrounding Chen’s escape. Some articles written in the early stages of the Chen affair, like this one in the Washington Post, don’t even mention forced abortion and sterilization or the one-child policy at all, describing Guangcheng merely as a “lawyer” and “dissident.” While there are exceptions to the rule, mentioning forced abortion and sterilization as an aside seems par for the course across the mainstream-media board.

While a number of right-wing pro-life news outlets have called out the mainstream media for neglecting the forced abortion issue (here, here, and here), they have also used the story to further their own anti-choice agenda, reframing Chen Guangcheng as an anti-abortion pro-lifer and attempting to spin the Obama administration’s response as a Democratic “war on women” (You can find elaborate coverage of the pro-life spin cycle operation here).

This re-made, right-wing narrative is not only false; it also distorts the real story. Guangcheng isn’t ”anti-choice” and the issue in China isn’t “abortion.”  It’s forced abortion.

Like Chen, reproductive rights and justice advocates oppose forced sterilization and forced abortion as violent and coercive assaults on women and their reproductive freedom. These practices are simply unconscionable. They inflict physical harm, strip women of their bodily integrity, and violate basic human dignity.

As one blogger over at Feministing argues,

These kinds of coercions disproportionately affect people of color, poor people, trans people, and other historically marginalized people. For all these reasons and more, the issue of forced sterilization and forced abortion is clearly a feminist issue.

That’s why I’m disappointed that Guangcheng is not being hailed more widely as a feminist hero and champion of reproductive rights. While it’s not clear what his position would be on a wide range of reproductive freedoms, it is certain that his crusade against forced abortion is a feminist cause. More apt than the whitewashed “human rights activist” label he’s been given in the news is “reproductive rights activist” and perhaps even “feminist.”

Whatever Guangcheng’s positions on reproductive rights might be, it’s clear that forced sterilization and abortion are issues that everyone should take seriously. Let’s hope that media outlets begin giving the public the context of his story, and that opponents of abortion rights stop distorting it.

Previously on Biopolitical Times:

• Disturbing Reports of Government-led Forced Sterilization in Uzbekistan
• Mara Hvistendahl's Unnatural Selection Finalist for Pulitzer 
• North Carolina Leads the Way in Compensation for Eugenic Sterilization Victims
• Republican Bill Exploits Concerns about Sexism and Racism to Undermine Abortion Rights
• Sex Selection: Tools for Action
  

A few weeks ago, I received my PhD, the end to a long and arduous 7-year path. The significance of this accomplishment has been slowly sinking in, but recently, I’ve been feeling pretty proud about it. According to a recent study in the Journal of Personality, however, I need to get off my high horse and accept the truth: It’s just about my genes.

The study of 800 pairs of twins compares the success of fraternal twins and identical twins, presuming that in both cases environment, commonly thought to shape success, would be constant. Yet twin studies have long been criticized for resting on two faulty assumptions: first, that identical twins are genetically indistinguishable and second, that the social environment treats fraternal and identical twins similarly.

Additionally, to suggest that “success” is genetically determined assumes that “success” can somehow be defined outside of our cultural frames. While I feel that my American Studies PhD should constitute a sign of “success,” others would define “success” more narrowly – say, making a lot of money as a CEO or corporate lawyer. (Have you heard the joke: What’s the difference between a large pizza and an American Studies degree? A large pizza feeds a family of four!)

Now, I’ll certainly be the first to argue that one’s success in life isn’t all about hard work and determination. It’s also about socially defined privileges. As a white female, I faced advantages based on my race and disadvantages based on my gender along the way. My skin color and sex were certainly shaped by my genetic heritage, but unfortunately, this sort of socially embedded understanding of genetics wasn’t what the Journal of Personality study has in mind.

Perhaps I just don’t want to admit that my accomplishments were hard-wired into my biology. But more likely, the “success gene” simply represents another gene of the week.

For most women in their 20s and 30s, deciding to spend $18,000 to freeze a batch of their eggs for future fertility treatment would not be easy. This is true especially given that the procedure is considered experimental: The frozen-and-thawed eggs might never lead to a successful pregnancy. But help from other “investors” – their parents – could tip the balance for many.

According to a recent New York Times article, more and more would-be grandparents are now trying to up their chances of eventually having grandchildren, by paying for their daughters to undergo oocyte preservation. The article mentions that there is no guarantee the frozen eggs will be viable, but notes that the gamble tends to “seem less weighty to patients when their parents share the cost.”

Unfortunately, the gamble that the eggs won't "work" is the only risk mentioned in this article - or in a string of others in mainstream sources like the Huffington Post and CNN. Altogether excluded in these accounts are the health risks of egg retrieval to women, and the unknown effects on children born from frozen eggs.

Egg retrieval is an invasive procedure that entails notoriously under-studied health risks to women, including exposure to high doses of hormones. We do know that the risks are significant. Short-term, they include ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome that can progress rapidly to require hospitalization. Studies on long-term cancer and other risks are particularly lacking and those that do exist are inconclusive. In addition, there is no good data about the relatively few children who have been born from frozen eggs (most estimates are fewer than 2000 worldwide). Samantha Pfeifer, the chair of a committee of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, wrote in Nature that “some of the chemicals used in the freezing process are toxic to embryos, and no one knows how much the eggs absorb. Moreover, there has been no systematic follow-up of children born from frozen eggs.”

These considerations are part of what led the ASRM, the fertility industry's professional organization, to deem egg freezing experimental. Now, some in the fertility industry are pressuring for removing that label, a move that would certainly encourage the practice, and thus increase the industry’s customer base and profits.

We can expect press releases and fertility clinic websites to ignore or downplay the risks associated with egg freezing. It’s too bad when articles in prestige media outlets do the same.

In 2007, Steven W. Mosher, president of the anti-choice Population Research Institute, proposed a strategy to “divide and demoralize” abortion rights advocates, and to do so “even more than [the] partial birth abortion debate did.” His proposal: that “the pro-life movement adopt as our next goal the banning of sex-selective abortion.”

Arguing that this approach is an important step in the effort to outlaw abortion completely, Mosher continued:

Most people of moderate persuasion, even those inclined to be “pro-choice,” will agree that the right of the unborn child to life should not depend on whether she (or he) possesses the requisite genitalia….While the pro-aborts are stuttering, we pro-lifers will be advancing new moral and logical arguments against the exercise of the “right” to an abortion solely on the grounds of sex….

We can also highlight the trivial reasons that drive most abortions by highlighting the most frivolous of them all….In these and other ways, the debate over this legislation will not subtract from, but add to, the larger goal of reversing Roe v. Wade.

Abortion rights opponents quickly took up Mosher’s idea. In 2008, US Representative Trent Franks (R-AZ) introduced the strategically named “Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Discrimination Act,” which proposed prohibiting sex selective and “race selective” abortions. Between 2009 and 2011, similar bills were introduced in 13 states [pdf], including two that passed in Oklahoma and Arizona.

Now the anti-abortion group Live Action is apparently getting into the act. Two years ago, the right-wing sting operation hired actors to pose as a pimp and a prostitute, and ask about birth control and abortion services at Planned Parenthood clinics. It then released videos falsely implying that Planned Parenthood is complicit in sex trafficking. Investigations found that Live Action’s videos have “little relation to what happened in reality, due to heavy editing that alters the meaning of conversations.” 

But the exposés of Live Action’s false exposé seem not to have stopped it. Over the past several months, Planned Parenthood has noticed a series of suspicious visits that have all the earmarks of a Live Action scheme. According to the Huffington Post,
clinics in at least 11 states have reported two dozen or more "hoax visits" over the past several weeks, in which "a woman walks into a clinic, claims to be pregnant and asks a particular pattern of provocative questions about sex-selective abortions, such as how soon she can find out the gender of the fetus, by what means and whether she can schedule an abortion if she's having a girl."

US advocates of reproductive rights have often had a hard time confronting sex selection, in part because of the decades of relentless attacks on abortion rights. Much as American feminists are troubled by sex selection, most realize that to interrogate women about their reasons for terminating a pregnancy would do more harm than good. Unfortunately, this political conundrum has led many to muffle their concerns about sex selection, or even to deny that it’s a problem in countries other than India and China.

But Planned Parenthood’s response to the suspected Live Action sting has broken that pattern. An article by the organization’s vice president of education and senior medical advisor is explicit about the organization’s opposition to sex selection:

As a women’s rights advocate for nearly 100 years, Planned Parenthood finds the concept of sex selection deeply unsettling. Planned Parenthood does not offer sex determination services; our ultrasound services are limited to medical purposes….

Planned Parenthood condemns sex selection motivated by gender bias, and urges leaders to challenge the underlying conditions that lead to these beliefs and practices, including addressing the social, legal, economic, and political conditions that promote gender bias and lead some to value one gender over the other.

Forthright explanations like these are the best way to defeat right-wing efforts to brandish sex selection as a weapon in their war against abortion rights. When pro-choice leaders acknowledge sex selection as a real and significant problem, they clear the way to focus on the hypocrisy of opposing abortion rights in the name of concerns about girls and women.

Mara Hvistendahl, whose recent Pulitzer Prize-nominated book vexed anti-choice figures because it strongly condemns sex selection and just as strongly supports abortion rights, says it best: “Antiabortion advocates would have us believe that the practice of sex selection – a fundamentally sexist act – somehow justifies further curtailing women’s rights.”

Previously on Biopolitical Times:

• Republican Bill Exploits Concerns about Sexism and Racism to Undermine Abortion Rights
  
• Mara Hvistendahl's Unnatural Selection Finalist for Pulitzer
  
• Behind the New Arizona Abortion Ban
  
• Sex Selection: Tools for Action