Pharmaceutical Butchers of Beijing

Source: by Michelle Malkin Washington Friday, October 20

- Boycott this! Boycott that! Fill in the blank: Grapes. Diamonds. Tobacco. Wal-Mart. Nike. Nestle. Denny's. Disney. McDonald's. Burma. Nigeria. South Africa. For every politically incorrect product, corporation and location under the sun, there is a left-wing consumer campaign calling attention to human rights violations. Except one. "BOYCOTT THE PHARMACEUTICAL BUTCHERS OF BEIJING!" Is there a protester out there brave enough to wear that phrase on a T-shirt? Search high and low, but you will not find any hell-raising, Birkenstock-wearing, peace-loving activists criticizing communist China's peddlers of RU-486, the abortion pill. The Washington Post reported last week that the Hua Lian Pharmaceutical Co., a government-owned firm outside of Shanghai, will manufacture mifepristone - the raw compound for RU-486 - for sale in the United States. The firm is one of three in China that makes the drug. It won U.S. approval to produce and export abortion drug ingredients here thanks to financial help from population control fanatics at the Rockefeller Foundation. Pro-abortion groups are ecstatic. But while American women celebrate their newly acquired "choice," millions of pregnant women in China are forced to swallow the poison pill against their will. It is no small coincidence that RU-486 was originally developed by a drug company whose parent corporation manufactured Zyklon B - the poison gas used in Nazi concentration camps to destroy millions of unwanted lives. Family-planning propagandists in China slyly echo the liberating rhetoric of their U.S. counterparts. "RU-486 has given women more choices, and it's been beneficial to women's health," Gao Ersheng, director of the Shanghai Institute of Planned Parenthood Research, told the Post last week. "Most unmarried women prefer mifepristone, which is less painful and more private than surgical abortions," Gao told The New York Times. Preferences? Pain? Privacy? Since when did Chinese family-planning bureaucrats care about any of those things? Certainly not since they instituted the one-child policy in 1979. An army of 200,000 officials and a million volunteers who comprise "street committees" snoop on the fertility of Chinese citizens. The government keeps dossiers tracking women's menstrual cycles. All women who "choose" to undergo surgical abortion "prefer" to do so without anesthesia. Out of an estimated 10 million abortions performed in China each year, The Washington Post reports, about half of those that are performed in the cities use RU-486. The other 5 million women undergo such methods as saline injections to induce miscarriage; Rivalor injections, which cause congestive heart failure in the unborn baby, who is then delivered dead; or partial-birth abortions in which doctors inject formaldehyde into a baby's soft spot as the child crowns during delivery. "Neither abortion nor RU-486 is a subject of moral debate in China in the way it is in the United States," the Post noted. There is no debate in China about anything. When a family disagrees with the government's diagnosis, the consequences are hellish - ranging from backbreaking fines and forced sterilization to mass infanticide. Using China's own census data, a Swedish study of sex ratios concluded that several million baby girls have vanished - up to half a million a year between 1985 and 1987 alone - since the one-child policy was introduced. If you think government-sponsored baby-killing no longer happens in 21st century China, you missed last month's international headlines: "Chinese officials drown baby in front of parents." Huang Quisheng, a rural farmer, told London reporters how family planners had tried to induce a miscarriage in his eight-months-pregnant wife by injecting saline solution into her womb. Against the odds, their baby son survived and was born healthy. But, as Huang recounted: "They grabbed him from me and threw him to the floor and kicked him several times. We were ordered to go home as they took him to the back of the government building and drowned him ...." The enforcers of this brutal regime will now reap profits by selling their deadly abortion pills to the United States. Feminists embrace them; the White House toasts them; a bipartisan Congress rewards them with a multibillion-dollar trade deal. The laboratories of an evil empire churn and bellow as millions of Chinese parents mourn. And where are America's human rights activists? Boycotting Happy Meals, sneakers and Kathie Lee.