Three fellow soldiers in the American anti-abortion movement, Rev. Patrick J. Mahoney, Director of the Christian Defense Coalition and a former Operation Rescue spokesperson, Brandi Swindell, the national director of Generation Life, and Michael McMonagle, founder of Generation Life, took their cause to China last week, where they were twice detained and eventually deported on August 8 by Chinese officials for demonstrating against abortion and religious persecution at Tiananmen Square.
The three said they went to the site of the 1989 government crackdowns to “stand in solidarity with our oppressed Chinese brothers and sisters,” focusing particularly on religious persecution against Christians and other believers (namely the Falun Gong, on whose behalf Mahoney and Swindell have protested before), and the forced abortions that sometimes occur under China’s one-child population policy. The activists unfurled a banner that read, “Jesus Christ is King,” and shouted to bystanders, “End the brutality. To those who are forced to go through forced abortions and have no voice, we are your voice.”
In an unusual display of laxity by China, which is rarely tolerant of protesters—particularly domestic dissenters—the three were questioned and quickly released after their first protest. Nonetheless, US anti-abortion groups dispensed hand-wringing press releases at the 14-hour silence following the group’s arrest, before the three were flown home at China’s expense.
Claiming to be persecuted has become a familiar feature of Christian right rhetoric used by everyone from pharmacists refusing to fill birth control prescriptions to public officials erecting Ten Commandments monuments. But the most savvy religious-right activists hitch their complaints to actual instances of repression, such as the growing number of American evangelicals claiming common cause with “the persecuted church” as does exist in countries like China, and thereby gaining martyrdom-status by proxy.
This applies doubly for abortion and population politics, where the abuses of China’s one-child policy are put to full use by anticontraception activists such as Steve Mosher of the Population Research Institute—a self-described “China watcher” who has written nonfiction books and thrillers about China’s impending world takeover—to equate forced or coercive sterilizations and abortions in some developing nations with all family planning efforts worldwide, and thereby justifying the defunding of the United Nations Population Fund, which helps governments enact family planning and population policies and expand access to reproductive health services, to the tune of $34 million for the past seven years.
Read more here.
