When a doll was to be made in her likeness in 1933, the instructions given from her organization, Mother’s Day Inc., were for a visage that was “fair, with blue eyes and light brown hair.” She stood 5-foot-5 and preferred blue, size 40 costume gowns with an open neck, pearl necklaces, and blue hats atop her untamed hair. In her younger days, Jarvis was described as attractive and intelligent.
In a Reader’s Digest story from 1960, a reporter recounts visiting her on one of the last Mother’s Days in her Philadelphia home: “She told me, with terrible bitterness, that she was sorry she ever started Mother’s Day.” On the wall was a large portrait of her mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, surrounded by holly wreaths. Heavy curtains hid a broken window and darkened a Victorian parlor filled with horsehair furniture and clutter from decades of Mother’s Day proclamations, letters, and news clippings. In the late 1930s and early ’40s, a “Warning - Stay Away” sign greeted visitors, and Jarvis answered the door only if a visitor used a secret knock or a certain number of doorbell rings. Whatever this “reduce non-medically necessary abortion” program entails, women in China can be expected to continue to fight for their reproductive rights.During the last 10 years of her life, Anna Jarvis, the founder of Mother’s Day, lived with her blind sister, Lillian, in a three-story redbrick house in North Philadelphia. In the past, to take control of their own bodies, countless women in China fought back against the abusive measures to restrict the number of children they could have. What hasn’t changed is that China’s government still treats women's bodies as tools for its economic development goals. And now, without government acknowledgment or accountability, Beijing is doing a potentially abusive about-face. Today, many across the country still painfully feel the trauma of forced abortion. In June this year, Beijing announced the three-child policy, to which many online reacted with dismay and derision. In 2015, Beijing instituted a two-child policy allowing all couples to have two children, which, despite initially raising the birth rate, had little impact on population growth. The one-child policy contributed to a rapidly ageing population and a dwindling labor force, so the government increasingly wanted more pregnancies. From May to August 1991 in Guan and Shen counties in Shandong province, the authorities imposed the “Childless Hundred Days” campaign in which all pregnancies were forcibly aborted, regardless of whether the birth would have been in compliance with the one-child policy. To enforce this policy, the authorities subjected countless women to forced contraception, forced sterilization, and forced abortion, especially in the 1980s and 1990s.
Then in 1979, to curb population growth and ease natural resource challenges, the government imposed the draconian “one-child policy,” which limited most couples to just one child. As a result, China’s population nearly doubled in 30 years. Shortly after the Chinese Communist Party took power in China in 1949, Chairman Mao Zedong encouraged population growth to create manpower. It’s unclear what specific policies the government has planned to “reduce non-medically necessary abortions,” but given its history of restricting women’s right to reproductive choice and bodily autonomy through abusive, and sometimes violent, means, this development is a grave cause for concern. The 2011-2020 guidelines, in the same place, said, “prevent and control unintended pregnancy and abortion.”
The State Council, China’s cabinet, in its “Chinese Women’s Development Guidelines” for 2021-2030, announced today, identified “reducing non-medically necessary abortions” as a step toward women’s development. A promotion for China's defunct one-child policy remains on the outer wall of a government office in Bobai, Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, August 26, 2021.
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