Martha Burk recently revisited her campaign against Augusta National, the all-male golf club that hosts the Master’s tournament, commenting on Tiger Woods return to golf.  She said: “They’re all chauvinists themselves. It’s a perfect fit. He’ll be welcomed. These people have a fundamental disregard for women.”


I thought of that today when I read this story, linked on Drudge, about a society that actually does have a fundamental disregard for women: China. In the UK’s Daily Mail, Peter Hitchens writes:



Thanks to a state policy which has limited many families to one child since 1979, combined with an ancient and ruthless prejudice in favour of sons, the world’s new superpower is beginning the century of its supremacy with an alarming surplus of males.


By the year 2020, there will be 30 million more men than women of marriageable age in this giant empire, so large and so different (its current population is 1,336,410,000) that it often feels more like a separate planet than just another country. Nothing like this has ever happened to any civilisation before.


The nearest we can come to it is the sad shortage of men after the First World War in Britain, France, Russia and Germany, and the many women denied the chance of family life and motherhood as a result.


It is possible that the effects of that imbalance are still with us, in the shape of the radical feminist movement which found ready recruits among the husbandless teachers and other professionals of the Twenties and Thirties.


But men without women are altogether more troublesome than women without men, especially when they are young.


All kinds of speculation is now seething about what might happen; a war to cull the surplus males, a rise in crime, a huge expansion in the prostitution that is already a major industry in every Chinese city, a rise in homosexuality.


Three things are for sure. It cannot now be prevented, and it is already beginning to be obvious in the schools. It is also stimulating a miserable trade in stolen children.


The Chinese state, never having intended this result and increasingly alarmed by it, is now using all its huge propaganda resources to try to stop the slaughter of unborn girls.


Hitchen describes traveling across China and seeing classrooms in which boys outnumber girls two-to-one. It’s appalling and tragic, and not just for the millions of girls denied life because of their sex, but for the women who feel driven to destroy their daughters, and for the larger society that gives such low value to what should be half its population.


It’s perhaps the ultimate example of violence against women. The Chinese state truly controls women’s bodies through the one child policy, coercing and sometimes forcing abortions, and denying women their most basic reproductive rights. It leads to the destruction of millions of girls in what’s being dubbed a “gendercide” as families restricted to just one child abort or kill girls babies in pursuit of a male heir.


One would think that few things would generate as much rage among feminists. Yet most of the old guard feminists seem much more comfortable denouncing the existence of Augusta, than they do criticizing the one-child policy.


In a report in CNSNews, one human rights activists who focuses on raising awareness about the one child policy explains the reticence of so many to condemn the policy:



“It’s hard for any American administration to address the one-child policy in China, number one, because when it’s talked about in this country, it winds up being portrayed as part of the abortion debate,” Kempton told CNSNews.com. Forced abortion and forced sterilization are not a choice, she added.
 
Kempton is the Washington director of the Laogai Research Foundation, which was founded in 1992 by a Chinese dissident to investigate and document human rights abuses in China’s prison camps (laogai).
 
Kempton said environmentalists and zero-population-growth advocates also share responsibility for discouraging American criticism of China’s one-child policy. “There are people who don’t understand the human consequences of the policy, who say that the world should have the one-child policy, and we should be applauding China for their draconian approach to population control,” Kempton said….


But according to Kempton, environmentalists may not realize the extent of human rights violations China’s one-child policy engenders through its institutionalized violence against women….


CNSNews.com asked Kempton why feminist organizations such as National Organization for Women (NOW) and Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPF) do not express more outrage about the oppression and violence directed against women in China.


Kempton reiterated that objections to China’s one-child policy should focus on human rights and should not be turned into an abortion debate.


“Personally, I am pro-choice, and I don’t know why these organizations don’t get more involved in this issue. I mean, it is something that affects one-fifth of the world’s women,” Kempton said.


“I would really like to see-particularly in the United States-I would like to see us put aside our differences on pro-life or pro-choice and just agree that this is not a choice and that we need to help the Chinese women and speak out against the policy,” Kempton said.


Kempton’s got it right. This isn’t about the abortion debate in the United States. This is about basic human rights and women’s rights, and it should be front-and-center for feminists everywhere.