Women's Rights Advocates In China Hope Sec. Of State Clinton Will Address Violations

Main Category: Women's Health / Gynecology
Also Included In: Sexual Health / STDs;  Abortion
Article Date: 19 Feb 2009 - 5:00 PDT

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Continued reports of reproductive rights abuses have provoked increasing outrage among women's rights advocates and advocates hope that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will address the violations when she visits China this week, London's Sunday Times reports. According to the Times, Clinton is expected "to tackle Beijing on a broader range of issues than the economics-focused approach taken by the Bush administration," and she has said that she plans to take a firmer stance on human rights issues. During a 1995 women's conference in Beijing, Clinton said that it was a "violation of human rights when women are denied the right to plan a family," which prompted anger from the Chinese government, the Times reports. According to the Times, the practices of forced abortion, sterilization and infanticide still persist in the country, despite some laws in place to restrict them. Some officials are "stepping up humiliating interventions" into women's lives, reportedly using pregnancy tests and threatening financial penalties or job loss to pressure women to undergo sterilization, the Times reports. China's 1979 one-child policy restricts urban families to one child and rural families to two children, if the first child born is a girl or disabled. Although physical coercion of abortion or sterilization procedures were banned in 2002, there are numerous reports in the Chinese media that the practices continue (Sheridan, Sunday Times, 2/15).

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