Many women in the United States and other parts of the world are commemorating International Women’s Day by striking under the hashtag battle cry #ADayWithoutAWoman. The organizers declared that during the strike, arguably replete with problems, “women and our allies will act together creatively to withdraw from the corporations that harm us and find ways to support the businesses, organizations and communities that sustain us.”

But while elitist feminists took a day off work (even forcing some schools to shut down), Yue Zhang, a Chinese immigrant and victim of forced abortion, participated on a panel at the Heritage Foundation about the gross human rights violations intertwined with China’s family planning policy.

Zhang’s Story

“Today I understand that the victim must be grave enough to share the truth,” Zhang began Wednesday afternoon.

In August 2013, she found she was pregnant. Her initial reaction of surprise and happiness was quickly followed by worry. Zhang, 28 at the time, was not married. In China, giving birth out of wedlock is illegal. “I was worried for the future of my child,” she said.

If a woman does give birth out of wedlock, her child will not receive registration, or hukou —meaning they can never attend school, receive healthcare or even be officially married. “They are illegal persons for their entire lives in China,” Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers and a fellow panelist, explained.

Nevertheless, Zhang wanted her child. But five months into her pregnancy, she found government officials waiting outside her home. They’d discovered she was pregnant, and informed her that she would need to have an abortion or pay a social maintenance fee. The next month they returned, this time breaking into Zhang’s house. Again, family planning officers told Zhang that she would have to have an abortion or pay a fee. They also threatened to call her bank, have her house confiscated and tell her employer to fire her.

Zhang inquired about the family planning policy and social maintenance policy of her province. “I learned that with my annual income and in order for my child to get hukou, I needed to pay over $60,000 U.S. dollars of social maintenance fee, a penalty I simply couldn’t afford,” she said. “But I never wanted to give up [my child’s] innocent little life.”

To the Chinese government, what Zhang wanted didn’t matter. For a third time, government officials came to Zhang’s home, pulling her into a vehicle outside. At the hospital she was placed on an operation table. “I kept shouting and struggling,” Zhang said. The doctor administered an injection into her abdomen.

“After a few hours of stomach pain, I started to see blood,” Zhang, struggling through visibly painful emotion, recalled before the panel. Hours later she gave birth to her lifeless baby.

“I dared not open my eyes to see the child. … I cried when the doctor and the nurse took away the little life. I wanted to beg them to leave this with me, but I couldn’t speak. After a while the doctor gave me another shot saying it was to stop the pain, but the pain did not stop. … Lying on that bed, I felt my body was cut open and broken.”

Zhang’s pain continued long after the abortion as she experienced nightmares, hallucinations and feelings of guilt. “Sometimes I believed it was my fault,” Zhang confessed. “I hated myself for getting pregnant without getting married and causing my child to die.”

The Continued Abuse and Extermination of Chinese Women

Congressman Chris Smith (R-NJ 4th District) is a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee and Congressional Executive Commission on China. Even though in 2016, China adopted a two-child policy to replace their one-child policy, Smith said nothing has changed.

“There has been no change in the basic structure of coercive population control in China,” he said, pointing out that women’s menstrual cycles are still monitored, and that women are required to get regular ultrasounds to ensure that they are not pregnant without permission.

“When a woman is so maltreated by her own government … that has psychological impacts on her that are lifelong,” Smith said, noting that between 25 and 40 percent more women than men kill themselves in China. “The cruelty is just unimaginable.”

Olivia Enos, a research associated at Heritage, said during the panel that China’s child limitation and anti-female policies are leading to a future shortage of workers in the labor force and an increasingly older society. “On average China has 114 boys for every 100 girls,” Enos said, adding that in some provinces, as many as 126 boys are born for every 100 girls.

As Smith pointed out, it’s estimated that by 2020, 40 million men will be unable to find wives “because they have been exterminated” through sex-selective abortion.

So why does China continue to maintain child limitation policies? Littlejohn suggested that “terror is the purpose of the policy. … I believe this is social control masquerading as population control.”

What the United States Should Do

Even though “it’s easy to think that there’s nothing more that can be done,” Enos said, the U.S. government could do three things to help end China’s child limitation policies and human rights violations.

The first thing, Enos said, is to create working groups in China to work with Chinese officials to roll back and eventually eliminate the coercive family planning policies. Secondly, Enos said the new presidential administration should engage on human rights issues in any forum possible. Third, the U.S. should stop sending contributions to UNFPA — the United Nations Population Fund.

Federal taxpayer contributions to UNFPA have funded coercive family planning in China, Enos said. Smith added that rather than condemning human rights violation in China, the UNFPA actively encourages other nations to adopt child limitation policies. “When you whitewash crimes against humanity, you become complicit,” he said.

The Rest of Zhang’s Story

With her mother’s help, Zhang came to the United States at the end of 2014.

“As a stranger in this country, I feel the culture of open society. I feel the air of freedom, democracy and human rights,” she said.

One day during a class at a language school in the U.S., a classmate asked Zhang whether it was true that China enforced child limitation policies. When Zhang explained the policy to them and witnessed their indignation, she realized she was blameless for what happened in that hospital.

“It was at that time I realized it was not my fault,” she said. “In fact, my children always had the rights to come into this world. On the contrary, it was the Chinese government’s fault. China’s family planning policy prosecuted me and violated my legal rights. It is the government that represents Chinese Communist party that should feel ashamed.”

Watch the entire panel discussion below.

(For more from the author of “While Women ‘Strike,’ Victim of Chinese Forced Abortion Shares Her Story” please click HERE)

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Jane Roe did not live out her life by the script.

As the “Roe” of the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, she would have been expected to be a staunch pro-choice advocate for the rest of her life.

She wasn’t.

Roe, whose real name was Norma McCorvey, died Saturday in Texas of a heart ailment. She was 69.

In an ad from 2008, as the Catholic News Agency noted, McCorvey detailed her change of views on abortion after she became a Christian in the mid-1990s.

“Upon knowing God, I realized that my case, which legalized abortion on demand, was the biggest mistake of my life,” she said.

“You see, abortion has eliminated 50 million innocent babies in the U.S. alone since 1973. Abortion scars an untold number of post-abortive mothers and fathers and families, too.”

It wasn’t the first time she’d spoken about her pro-life perspective.

“I believe that I was used and abused by the court system in America,” McCorvey said in testimony in 2005 before a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “Instead of helping women in Roe v. Wade, I brought destruction to me and millions of women throughout the nation.”

She detailed her journey over the years from abortion advocate to pro-life activist in that testimony, in which she mentioned the baby she ultimately chose not to abort:

I am glad today that that child is alive and that I did not elect to abort. I was actually silent about my role in abortion for many years and did not speak out at all. Then, in the 1980s, in order to justify my own conduct, with many conflicting emotions, I did come forward publicly to support Roe v. Wade. …

Then around 1992, I began to work in abortion clinics. Like most Americans, including many of you senators, I had no actual experience with abortion until that point. When I began to work in the abortion clinics, I became even more emotionally confused and conflicted between what my conscience knew to be evil, and what the judges, my mind and my need for money were telling me was OK. I saw women crying in the recovery rooms. If abortion is so right, why were the women crying?

Even Sen. Hillary Clinton on January 25, 2005 was reported by The New York Times to finally admit ‘that abortion is a sad, even tragic choice for many, many women.’ Actually it is a tragic choice for every child that is killed and every woman and man who participates in killing their own child, whether they know it at the time or not. Many women will be in denial and even pro-choice for years like I was.

But participating in the murder of your own child will eat away at your conscience forever if you do not take steps to cleanse your conscience, which I will discuss later.

I saw the baby parts, which are a horrible sight to see, but I urge everyone who supports abortion to look at the bodies to face the truth of what they support. I saw filthy conditions in abortion clinics even when ‘Roe’ was supposed to clean up ‘back alley’ abortions. I saw the low regard for women from abortion doctors.

My conscience was bothering me more and more, causing me to drink more and more and more. If you are trapped in wrongdoing then all you can do is justify and defend your actions, but the pain gets worse and worse, so I drank a lot to kill the pain.

Finally, in 1995, a pro-life organization moved its offices right next door to the abortion clinic where I was working. I acted hatefully towards those people. But those people acted lovingly to me most of the time. One man did angrily accuse me at one point of being responsible for killing 40 million babies, but he later came to me and apologized for his words and said they were not motivated by love. The answer to the abortion problem is forgiveness, repentance, and love.

McCorvey was, to understate it, an unlikely pro-life activist.

But her own conversion on abortion gives hope that other Americans will follow in her footsteps. (For more from the author of “The Pro-Life Legacy of Norma McCorvey, the ‘Roe’ of Roe v. Wade” please click HERE)

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A popular book chronicling the story of abortionist Kermit Gosnell, who was convicted for murdering several infants, was left off of The New York Times best-seller list.

Since its release on Jan. 24, “Gosnell: The Untold Story of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer” quickly reached Amazon’s best-seller list, but was left off The New York Times’ hardcover nonfiction best-seller list.

It should have been the “fourth best-selling nonfiction title,” according to a press release by Regnery Publishing, the book’s publisher.

“Gosnell” authors Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer covered the detailed story of the prolific abortion doctor and convicted murderer. The book includes an exposé of Gosnell’s practices, including a description of “his collection of severed baby feet and heads in his basement,” according to the Conservative Book Club.

According to Publishers Weekly, McElhinney and McAleer’s book was the ninth best-selling on the hardcover nonfiction best-seller list last week, and currently sits at No. 22 on the list.

When released, the book quickly sold out at both Amazon and Barnes & Noble and reached the top spot on Amazon’s “Hot New Release” list on the first day of its release.

“This book rose to No. 4 on Amazon without any coverage from the mainstream media,” McAleer told The Daily Signal in a phone interview. “The irony is that the book is about how the mainstream media refused to cover Gosnell’s murder trial. And even today, they’re still being shamefully dishonest.”

McElhinney and McAleer recently spoke at a Heritage Foundation event about their decision to write the book and produce a movie about Gosnell.

McAleer said that if the book had been published on the best-seller list, it would have been the first time the book was even mentioned by The New York Times.

“New York Times readers would’ve said, ‘What’s this book I’ve never heard of?’” McAleer said.

The book, however, is listed at No. 13 on the Feb. 12 edition of The New York Times’ combined print and e-book nonfiction list, Danielle Rhoades Ha, New York Times vice president of communications, told The Daily Signal in an email last week.

According to Rhoades Ha, the list was manufactured based on “confidential” sales records provided by retailers.

“The Times’s best-seller lists are based on a detailed analysis of book sales from a wide range of retailers who provide us with specific and confidential context of their sales each week,” she said. “These standards are applied consistently, across the board in order to provide Times readers our best assessment of what books are the most broadly popular at that time.”

This is not the first time The New York Times has snubbed a conservative author, according to NewsBusters.

“The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech,” written by a Wall Street Journal editorial board member Kimberley Strassel was left off of the top 20 hardcover best-seller list when it was released in June 2016, despite selling more copies than some of the books on the list.

Similar instances have occurred to other conservative authors, including Dinesh D’Souza, Ted Cruz, and David Limbaugh, according to NewsBusters. (For more from the author of “Book Detailing the Story of Infamous Abortionist Left off New York Times Best-Seller List” please click HERE)

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Of the hundreds of babies callously murdered over the course of years in a flea-bitten torture chamber in west Philadelphia, only seven – identified only by letters of the alphabet – made it to the courtroom.

Alongside their evidence was that of slain Karnamaya Mongar, a 41-year-old refugee from Bhutan, who had died in the same filthy “health clinic” run by mass-murderer and late-term abortionist Kermit Gosnell.

While Washington, D.C., just hosted its 44th March for Life on Friday, those still confused or on the fence about the cause for which so many turn up in the annual pilgrimage might want to turn their attention to “Gosnell: The Untold Story of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer” from Regnery Publishing, a new book by documentarians Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney about these atrocities and Gosnell’s criminal trial that followed.

This the latest product of an investigative project that began with a 2014 crowdfunding campaign to raise money for a movie about Gosnell. The film, which will feature Dean Cain as Detective James Woods, is currently seeking a distributor.

The filmmakers recently told The Christian Post that the reason they opted for both a book and film was that some of the material was far too gruesome for the screen.

“After we decided to make the movie we went to Philadelphia and started interviewing people, and we bought the trial transcripts and started going through them,” McElhinney told CP’s Brandon Showalter. “But we thought, people didn’t know them. And the stories should still be told.”

And the stories are brutal.

Page after page, the story delves into excruciating and heart-rending detail about the horrors woman and child alike endured at Gosnell’s macabre hellhole.

One section of the book outlines in a painful, rhythmic list what befell each of the seven babies for whose murders Gosnell was charged. Per The Daily Signal:

Baby boy A was born and murdered on the same day – July 12, 2008. He was so large, even in a clinic where late abortions were not unusual, that two clinic employees snapped pictures of him on their cell phones …

Baby E was the baby that cried – the one that [one employee] said “sounded like a little alien …”

After baby F jerked its leg to its chest, Gosnell cut its neck with scissors.

Baby G breathed. Gosnell snipped its neck.

The stories go on, each more devastating and horrific than the last, outlining decades of ghoulish gore on unsuspecting women and their helpless, innocent children.

But yet, all of this, all of it … ALL OF IT … went ignored by government authorities for years thanks in large part to the pro-abortion politics of officials like former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge and others.

In the process of writing the book, the atrocities McAleer and McElhinney uncovered actually converted the latter to the pro-life cause, she explains at The Daily Signal.

“I never trusted or liked pro-life activists,” McElhinney writes. “Even at college I thought them too earnest and too religious. I thought the shocking images they showed were manipulative.”

“Reading the testimony and sifting through the evidence in the case in the research for this book and for writing the script of the movie has been brutal. I have wept at my computer. I have said the Our Father sitting at my desk,” she adds. “I am no holy roller—I hadn’t prayed in years—but at times when I was confronted with the worst of this story I didn’t know what else to do.”

For those still confused about why so many people would drive or fly across the country to walk in the cold, rain, and/or snow year after year, this is why. You can attribute malice and misogyny; you can rail against some Marxist concept of a “patriarchy” or old-world theocracy. But none of this is correct.

The people who marched Friday, who come to the National Mall every January are out there for babies A through G — for the women harmed and scarred by the yet uncovered Kermit Gosnells out there. And yes, they’re out there for the children who may had their lives snuffed out more sterile environments, but had them snuffed out nonetheless.

They are why we march. (For more from the author of “Yes, America, the March for Life Is Still Relevant 44 Years After Roe v. Wade” please click HERE)

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