Barack Obama's Dilemma: Chen Guangcheng and Dead American Babies

by Jonathon Van Maren

Pro-life social media feeds and media everywhere are lighting up with the dramatic escape story of Chen Guangcheng, a blind Chinese human rights activist who has been a loud and consistent critic of China’s brutal and bloody One Child Policy, which includes forced abortions and forced sterilizations.

The situation at this point seems rather confusing. Chen, who has been under stringent house arrest with his family for several years after a four year stint in jail for defying China’s Communist government, apparently escaped on the night of April 22, scaling a wall in spite of blindness and fleeing with the help of fellow human rights activists hundreds of miles to the US embassy in Beijing. He was soon back in Chinese custody, with the Americans saying he left of his own volition and Chen saying he left because the Chinese officials were threatening the lives of his family. American officials are faced with a very slippery dilemma.

I would propose that this situation is tricky for the Obama Administration for more reasons than the oft-cited economic attachment to China. Barack Obama is the most pro-abortion president ever to hold office in the United States, so a human rights activist dealing with the issue of abortion is a sticky one to say the least. Chinese babies are one thing—but what if the discussion happened to stumble upon the pile of pre-born American corpses the Obama Administration so desperately wants to ignore?

Let me provide an illustration. In a phenomenal editorial yesterday, National Post editor Jonathan Kay published several anecdotes of the abortion culture in China, gut-wrenching in their descriptiveness:

“'Officials held her on the bed and gave her a poisonous shot, despite that her due day was soon,' according to a prepared statement from Chinese lawyer Jiang Tianyong that was presented to a U.S. Congressional hearing in 2009. 'The needle went through her belly to the nine-mouth old fetus. Li said, ‘At first, I could feel my child was kicking; after a while it stopped.’ Ten hours later, Li gave birth to a dead baby. The official threw the dead baby into a bucket.'”

Now consider this anecdote:

“One night, a nursing co-worker was taking an aborted Down's syndrome baby who was born alive to our Soiled Utility Room because his parents did not want to hold him and she did not have time to hold him. I could not bear the thought of this suffering child dying alone in a Soiled Utility Room, so I cradled and rocked him for the 45 minutes that he lived. He was about 22 weeks old, weighed about a half a pound, and was about 10 inches long, about the size of my hand. He was too weak to move very much, expending any energy that he had trying to breathe. Toward the end of his life he was so quiet that I couldn't tell if he was still alive unless I held him up to the light to see if his little heart was still beating through his chest wall. After he was pronounced dead, we folded his little arms across his chest, tied his hands together with a string, wrapped him in a tiny shroud, and carried him to the hospital morgue where all of our other dead patients go.”

That story comes from Jill Stanek’s congressional testimony on behalf of the Born Alive Infant’s Act, which was designed to protect children who survived an abortion and entitle them to medical care. Guess who voted against this bill?

You’re probably already with me: President Barack Obama.

China is not the only place where barbaric things happen with a repulsive regularity. China is simply the place where they are happening by state-enforced physical coercion (although North America has its fair share of forced abortions.) Chen Guangcheng is a hero, yes. But for the Obama Administration to recognize his heroism, they might just have to recognize the fact that in the stories of gruesome forced abortions, there were two victims. Is a dead baby tossed in a bucket any more tragic than a Down Syndrome child abandoned to die in a medical waste room? Both are tragic. And both are crimes against humanity.

The Obama Administration, however, does not consider the some of the victims Chen seeks to defend to be worthy of protection. Rather, the Obama Administration has its own skeletons in the closet it wants to ignore. And I fervently hope that Chen Guangcheng does not become one of them.