Biden: not 'second-guessing' China's one-child policy

August 23, 2011

During a visit to China, US Vice President Joseph Biden said that he can "fully understand" that country's brutal one-child population policy.

"Your policy has been one which I fully understand--I'm not second-guessing--of one child per family," Biden said. He objected to that policy only insofar as it eventually means "one wage earner will be taking care of four retired people." Biden, who is Catholic, lodged no objection to the forced abortions and sterilizations that have been widely reported as a result of the Chinese policy.

In his speech, which was dedicated mostly to economic concerns, Biden touched briefly on human-rights issues, but did not mention the one-child policy in that context. The American vice-president also did not mention religious freedom.

During an appearance on the Laura Ingraham radio show, Congressman Chris Smith of New Jersey commented on the one-child policy:

It is hideous. Women are hunted down, if they evade these family planning cadres into the ninth month, they are forcibly brought into a clinic and [their children] are aborted. I had a...Chinese student here in the United States, who finally got asylum, and she told her story, how they literally held her father, they held other people until she surrendered for this so-called voluntary abortion, and then she literally, roughly, had her baby removed. And, as she said, they actually put one of the body parts on her to mock her. I mean, that's how cruel this policy is. And there's Joe Biden, saying that he fully understands this one-child per couple policy. That is an outrageous statement. He prides himself on his combating violence against women. This is the worst, most pervasive act of violence against women anywhere in the world. It is systematic, and it is state-sponsored. And the United States of America under Obama, Hillary Clinton, and now the vice president, in this outrageous statement, is showing the world that we do not care about Chinese women and about Chinese babies.

 

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Further information:

• Remarks by Vice President Biden on U.S.-China Relations (US Department of State)
• Chris Smith on Joe Biden and China's One-Child Policy (American Spectator)