China and Population Control

To the Editor. —  I am writing to respond to the article by Dr Ma¹ entitled "One Child, One Family."Dr Ma, who we are told is an International Fellow in Medical Journalism, has presented a whitewashed apology for China's population control efforts that cannot go unchallenged.Dr Ma tells us that the one-child policy is "voluntary," that the government "encourages" this policy, and that abortion is "available." We are meant to infer that there is in place a policy that, much like in the United States, is there for those who want to use it but is not forced on anyone. Nothing could be further from the truth.Kubek² documented that forced abortion is part and parcel of China's population policies. Between 1971 and 1984, China's state-run abortion clinics performed 114 million abortions. He relates, using official state statistics, the infanticide of 1.3 million female infants during the