Now that Chen Guangcheng, the blind Chinese dissident, is settling into a new life in the United States after decades of persecution by China’s venal, autocratic government, he is receiving a hero’s welcome he never anticipated and now does not appear to appreciate.

Chen had dedicated much of his life to campaigning against involuntary abortions, sterilizations, tubal ligations and other means to forcibly prevent women from having a second child.

Well, in the U.S., right-to-life advocates in America’s fevered, never-ending abortion debate have seized on Chen as if he were one of their own. The National Right to Life Committee is citing him in fundraising appeals. The Family Research Council says it hopes Chen will influence the debate in “his new home, where the inhumanity of abortion is so often ignored.” Churches and other religious groups are besieging him with invitations.

But the truth is, these people grossly misunderstand him.

“The political issue of abortion is completely different here,” Sophie Beach, executive editor of China Digital Times, told me. “You can’t even equate the two.” In fact, if Americans understood the horror that pregnant Chinese women face, it would take their breath away.

Of course most everyone knows about China’s one-child rule, which does have a certain logic to it, given the state’s massive population, 1.35 billion. India is not far behind at 1.21 billion. But then comes a yawning gap to the next most populous nation, the United States, home to a “mere” 314 million.

Among the world’s largest countries, China is the only one that forcibly practices population containment nationwide. The exception, of course, is China’s wealthy, who can have as many children as they like, if they are willing to pay a fine.

For most others, however, the government aggressively tracks fertile women. It used to be, Beach said, that government workers “tried to track menstrual cycles, and that may be still happening in some villages.” China, in a recent United Nations submission on population issues, noted without elaboration that “regular physical checkups” of “reproductive health status” are routinely “conducted for students.”

The U.S. State Department has reported that China “goes to appalling lengths to enforce its one-child limit,” including forcing married women to submit to regular pregnancy tests. They’re fined if they don’t show up. If, despite that, women do get pregnant, the future can be terrifying.

In early June, photos of a woman who was seven months pregnant and forced to have an abortion went viral on Weibo and other Chinese social-media sites. One picture showed the dead fetus in a bucket of water.

“Our country is run by animals,” a typical commenter said.

That late-term abortion got lots of attention, but, as most Chinese know, it’s far from unusual. Yang Zhizhu, an associate professor of law at China Youth University, obtained Ministry of Health statistics showing that, on average, China performs 7 million abortions a year. It’s impossible to know how many of those may be voluntary, he notes in his blog. But in a nation where much of the population fights the one-child rule, voluntary abortions are probably rare.

“Mandated abortions employ violence and coercion,” he wrote. “There are ‘population schools’ that illegally detain the parents, grandparents and husband of the pregnant woman, or even the woman herself, in order to force them into ‘willingness.’ Neighbors, too, will scare the pregnant woman into ‘willingness,’” sometimes by vandalizing her home. (China Digital Times translated his blog.)

Last year’s State Department human-rights report pointedly quoted an American human-rights group reporting that “the one-month old daughter of a mother” in Anhui Province “was detained by local family-planning officials until the woman signed a document” agreeing to be sterilized.

Yang’s government report showed that in 2009, the most recent year cited, the state carried out 22.8 million “contraceptive surgeries,” meaning any invasive birth-control procedure ― sterilizations, abortions, vasectomies and the rest. It’s hard to believe that many of these were voluntary (except for those thousands of parents who choose to abort their unborn daughters).

Chen, in his many interviews, is quick to inveigh against China’s mandatory abortions and other forcible birth-control strategies, which are patently illegal under Chinese law. But the fact is, the Chinese government routinely flouts its own laws.

Over and over, Chen has said bringing the rule of law to his country is his highest priority. For him, the abortion debate in the United States must seem lame. Asked about it in interviews, he has repeatedly said: I haven’t given it much thought.

By Joel Brinkley

Joel Brinkley, a professor of journalism at Stanford University, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former foreign correspondent for the New York Times. ― Ed.

(Tribune Media Services)