Apart from the mass killings, things are so pleasant!

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Aug 16, 2011

One-child policy a surprising boon for China girls

That’s the headline on an AP story that should win some sort of prize for morally obtuse reporting.

The most obvious outcome of the China’s one-child policy, coupled with the deeply-ingrained desire for male children, has been the routine destruction of Chinese girls in the womb. The UN estimates that 43 million girls are “missing” in China today, due primarily to sex-selection abortions.

But for those who aren’t killed, the policy is a “boon,” AP tells us. The story explains that there are more girls studying in the finest schools, more girls owning laptops, more girls receiving lavish gifts from their families. Life is good—for those girls who survive long enough to experience it.

After 14 paragraphs of upbeat reporting, the AP story finally notices a cloud on the horizon:

Crediting the one-child policy with improving the lives of women is jarring, given its history and how it's harmed women in other ways. Facing pressure to stay under population quotas, overzealous family planning officials have resorted to forced sterilizations and late-term abortions, sometimes within weeks of delivery, although such practices are illegal.

So if you don’t count the women who are slaughtered in the womb, and the women who are subjected to involuntary sterilization, and the women who have their unborn children torn from their wombs by the government-backed butchers who drive around the country in vans equipped as slap-dash abortion clinics, and the women who live in fear, trying to dodge the family-planning officials who will punish them for pregnancy, and those who live with regrets, having sacrificed their children—if you exclude all those women—well then the one-child policy is a “boon” to the others.

Thanks, AP. Always nice to see a “good news” story.