Chinese Regime: Women Continue to Face Coercion, Crippling Fines Under Two-Child Policy

[TomSea]

Chinese Regime: Women Continue to Face Coercion, Crippling Fines Under Two-Child Policy
By Jonathan Abbamonte, Population Research Institute   

It has been a year since China’s Communist Party announced that it would be ending its notorious one-child policy and replacing it with a new policy which now permits all married couples to have up to two children. Despite the change, which some observers have described as a relaxing of the planned birth policy, coercion and human rights abuses remain.

As was the case under the one-child policy, the government continues to retain firm control over women’s reproductive autonomy. Couples who violate the new policy still face steep fines equal to as much as three to ten times their annual household income.

The use of fines remains a holdover from the former one-child policy and has become the primary mechanism used by the state, at least officially, to ensure compliance with the new policy. In places where local officials believe that fines have been insufficient to meet targets for the number of births per annum, other methods, which vary by locality in both type and application, have also been used to ensure compliance.

Women continue to face significant pressure and heavy-handed persuasion tactics from family planning officials to abort their children if they are over their birth quota. “We’ll definitely find you and persuade you to do an abortion,” one family planning official told an undercover investigator posing as a woman pregnant with her third child as part of a recent investigation by the BBC into China’s two-child policy.

Read More At: http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/2192043-women-continue-to-face-coercion-crippling-fines-under-two-child-policy/