China is aborting 23 million babies every year, a staggering 10 million increase from the government's commonly quoted figure of 13 million per year, according to the latest U.S. State Department report.
The Report says China is also still enforcing forced abortion and sterilisation on women and mothers as part of its population control policy.
"Thirteen million abortions a year was already an incomprehensible statistic," said Women's Rights Without Frontiers President Reggie Littlejohn. "But to add another 10 million is truly staggering, incomprehensibly tragic."
"Twenty-three million abortions a year comes to 63,013 abortions a day, 2,625 abortions an hour, 43 per minute," added Littlejohn.
She noted that the figure is 23 times the number of abortions performed in the United States at about 1 million per year. America has a population of 320 million while China's population is pegged at 1.4 billion.
The inconsistency stems from the fact that the statistics of Chinese government were collected only from registered medical institutions and did not include abortions from unregistered clinics.
Of the recorded abortions, 13 million came from women who had unplanned pregnancies, while the additional 10 million were chemically induced abortions performed in non-government facilities, the National Health Population and Family Planning Commission reports.
Despite the lifting of one-child-per-family restrictions, the report says in some cases this resulted in forced abortion, sometimes at advanced stages of pregnancy.
According to the U.S. State Department, laws in 18 Chinese provinces require abortion, sometimes euphemised as "remedial measures," for illegal pregnancies. Officials in the remaining 13 provinces also were found to have used forced abortion to meet birth limits, while others imposed social compensation fees "up to 10 times an individual's disposable income," reports Lifesite News.
Under today's Two-Child Policy, the Chinese government is still imposing coercion such as requiring a couple with two children to let one of them be sterilised and threatening to fire a worker if he refuses to abort a second child, the report says.
"This report proves what advocates have been saying all along: coercion, forced abortion and involuntary sterilisation continue unabated through 2015," Littlejohn said.
"China's new Policy is preserving a system of coercion, not ending it," she added.
