If pro-choice advocates support an organization that supports coercive abortion policies are they still pro-choice? China is notorious for having coercive abortion policies in order to enforce their populations control measures that they have in place. Another episode of this happening is making news:
Arzigul Tursun, who lives in China’s far northwest region, is more than six months pregnant and is being hounded by authorities who want her to have an abortion. Tursun already has two children with her husband.
Late on Sunday, Tursun fled the hospital that she was staying at while awaiting her abortion. But she was tracked down by police Monday afternoon at a relative’s house and was again taken to the hospital for an abortion, according to Radio Free Asia.
“The police found my wife,” Nurmemet Tohtasin, the woman’s husband, said in a telephone interview from the Women and Children’s Welfare Hospital, to RFA. “My wife’s father was already at the hospital. They will probably do the abortion today.”
The village chief and party secretary had forced her husband to find Tursun after she escaped from the hospital on Sunday. Nurmemet took officials to two of Tursun’s relatives’ homes and to her parents’ home.
“They said if we don’t find Arzigul, they would take our house and our farmland,” he said.
Source: Christian Post
The last eight years the Bush Administration has withheld money from the U.N. Population Fund because of its support of these practices. It is predicted that President-Elect Barack Obama will reverse that presidential order.
There is the general issue here of why taxpayer money is being used for this purpose at all. I believe it is entirely unethical to use taxpayer funds to support a practice that most people believe is wrong. Don’t mistake some people not wanting to outlaw abortion as being a supporters of the practice and feeling like it should be funded with taxes. This is really should be a bipartisan issue.
More specifically, why would a pro-choice president want to support financially an organization that enables taking a woman’s choice away? This doesn’t seem pro-choice to me. As far as I’m concerned this practice is anti-woman, and I don’t believe is representative of the type of change that Americans voted for.
