Silent: Vice President Biden Fails to Condemn China's Forced Abortion Policy

This Vice president who claims to be a practicing Catholic failed to oppose the brutality of forced abortions and sterilization. He remained silent before a brutal regime which subjects parents who have more than one child to fines, human rights abuses, beatings and imprisonment.He said he would not "second guess" this murderous policy. The Vice President addressed these communist materialists with an argument rooted in another version of materialism, an American economism which does not value the dignity of the human person.

P>CHESAPEAKE, VA (Catholic Online) - Vice-President Joe Biden is in mainland China on an official visit. It appears to be an effort to convince the Regime that the United States is a worthy debtor. His remarks in a prepared statement concerning the Regimes evil "one child policy" were reprehensible. They deserve a global outcry and I write to join the growing chorus.

This Vice President who claims to be a practicing Catholic is visiting a Nation which is openly persecuting the Catholic Church. Yet, he failed to call the regime to task demanding that they respect the right to religious freedom.

This Vice president who claims to be a practicing Catholic failed to openly oppose the brutality of forced abortions and sterilization. He remained silent before a brutal regime which subjects parents who have more than one child (or in rural areas possibly two) to fines, human rights abuses, beatings and imprisonment. Instead he said he fully understood it!

The Vice President addressed these communist materialists with an argument rooted in another version of materialism, an American economism which does not value the dignity of the human person. He told them that that the policy did not make economic sense and may cause them problems because of demography as they face dwindling resources in their social safety net. However, he said he would not "second guess" them. 

In a question and answer session after his main address he had the opportunity to stand up for human rights. However, rather than decry the evil of a Regime which forces sterilization and abortion as a flagrant violator of fundamental human rights, he said the following:

"You have no safety net.  Your policy has been one which I fully understand -- I'm not second-guessing -- of one child per family.  The result being that you're in a position where one wage earner will be taking care of four retired people.  Not sustainable. So hopefully we can act in a way on a problem that's much less severe than yours, and maybe we can learn together from how we can do that." 

Is it "second guessing" to oppose the killing of children in the womb through forced abortion? Is it "second guessing" to demand that this regime recognize fundamental human rights? This regime boasts that it has prevented 400 million births! In other words, this Regime has been complicit in the killing of 400 million of its youngest neighbors. Forced abortion was decried at the Nuremberg trials as a crime against humanity. Yet, this Catholic Vice president, Joe Biden, remained silent.

Fortunately, other Catholics in public office quickly spoke out. Congressman Chris Smith, a human rights hero and faithful Catholic made this statement in Congressional testimony earlier this year: "Since 1979, brothers and sisters have been illegal in China as part of the barbaric one child per couple policy. And for 30 years, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has vigorously supported, funded, defended, promoted, even celebrated these massive crimes against humanity.

"The uncontested facts are these: Any Chinese, Tibetan, or Uyghur mother without a birth permit is put under coercive pressure to abort - if need be, she is physically forced to do so. All unwed moms are compelled to abort. In what can only be described as a search-and-destroy mission, disabled children are aborted as part of a nationwide eugenics program."

In an interview with Catholic Radio commentator Laura Ingraham on Tuesday he said:  "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."

Similarly, the Catholic Speaker of the House John Boehner said: "I'm deeply troubled by the comments reportedly made by the Vice President yesterday regarding China's reprehensible one-child policy, which has resulted in forced sterilizations and coerced abortions and should not be condoned by any American official. No government on Earth has the authority to place quotas on the value of innocent human life, or to treat life as an economic commodity that can be regulated and taken away on a whim by the state."

In addition to this regimes crimes against humanity, such as forced abortion and sterilization, we have followed with alarm and concern their heavy handed efforts against the legitimate leadership of the Catholic Church in China. The Chinese Regime forcibly coerced Catholic Bishops faithful to the magisterium of the Catholic Church to attend an illegitimate gathering of the Regime-sponsored "Patriotic Association" (PA) and "Council of Bishops". They used violence against Catholic Bishops, priests and lay faithful.

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On Friday, December 17, 2010 the Holy See issued a strongly worded statement concerning the oppression of the Catholic Church by the regime in mainland China. They affirmed their continued willingness to engage in dialogue but condemned the 'grave violation' of the religious freedom of Catholics. They specifically decried the action of forcing priests and Bishops to attend the illegitimate gathering of what the statement rightly referred to as the "so called Bishops Conference and Catholic Patriotic Association".

Yet, this Catholic Vice President also said nothing about the persecution of Bishops and priests of his own church! He failed to defend those whom Mother Teresa called the poorest of the poor, children in the womb and he failed to defend his own Church. In the face of blatant evil and the repeated persecution against the Church of a tyrannical regime, this Catholic Vice President remained silent. His remarks can be read here.

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