The following is part two of a Barefoot Lawyer Reports interview with Reggie Littlejohn. To listen to the other parts, please check the link in the description.

Will Deatherage: Reggie, we’d be very interested to hear about Women’s Rights Without Frontiers and the work that you guys do to promote human rights, especially pertaining to Chinese human rights advocacy.

Reggie Littlejohn: So, as I mentioned, I’m an attorney, and I represented this refugee who’d been forcibly sterilized. And I founded Women’s Rights Without Frontiers in the early 2000s, maybe 2007, 2008. It didn’t actually get nonprofit status, I think, until 2011. The first idea in mind, expose and oppose forced abortion to China. And we were very successful at doing that because there was a man in China whose wife had been forcibly aborted at seven months. And she and he were both so emotionally shattered by that experience that they decided that they didn’t care if they would die, they were going to expose this to the west, obviously, with the hope that something would come of it, right? So he went around to villages where he lived and documented late term forced abortions, like forced abortions at nine months, where the woman herself died along with her full term baby.

He documented the way that they would tear down the homes of women who did not make it on time for their cervical checkup. I have a picture of a woman who was crying in front of her home that her own parents were forced to tear down because she missed her cervical checkup.

He sent another picture of a woman who had been beaten horribly with hoses for being one day late for her cervical checkup. It just goes on and on.

I believe he was the one who sent slogans from China about the one child policy. “One is better.” “Better 10,000 deaths than one excess birth.” Another one is, “If you don’t abort, we’ll hit your family like a tornado.” I mean, I’ve got a bunch of these. And then the third one that, I’m not sure if he was the source of it, but it came into my hand, something that I called “Best Practices Infanticide,” which was an email chain on the official OBGYN website for the Chinese obstetrical and gynecological association.

It was about how best to kill babies, late term babies who are being aborted, to make sure that they were born dead and not alive. So, with those three documents in my hand, which I had translated, I was able to go to the U.S. Congress and basically blow out of the water any defense that the Chinese government said that this is voluntary, totally not voluntary. 

And also I translated and disseminated the Chen Guangcheng. Chen Guangcheng, together with his wife Yuan Weijing, were very heroic inside of China, documenting these atrocities. And my organization was, I think, the first and probably the only one, I don’t know, that translated their report into English, and I released it on his birthday.

So that’s what we did to fight forced abortion. Then we got the idea of, why don’t we help women who are trying to escape forced abortion? So we started a small campaign to try to hide women who are trying to escape a forced abortion. But then we realized that baby girls were also being forcibly aborted just because they were girls. And this is not something that the government does. Okay, the government of China does not. Actually, it’s illegal in China to abort a baby because she’s a girl. Doesn’t matter. It happens all the time.

We started our Save a Girl campaign to save baby girls from sex selective abortion. It’s not imposed by the government. It’s imposed by the woman’s own family. Her husband and her mother in law are usually the key people, and sometimes her father-in-law are the key people trying to force her to abort a baby because she’s a girl.

We are the only organization in the world that has a network on the ground inside of China, that is saving baby girls. We’ll go to the door of a woman and say, “Congratulations on your daughter. Girls are as good as boys. And we will give you a monthly stipend of $25 a month to empower you to keep your daughter.”

And we’ve saved hundreds of baby girls. People want to help women keep their daughters. Go on the Women’s Rights Without Frontiers website and click on save a girl and you’ll learn more about how to do that. It’s the only way you can actually get your donation into the hands of a mother of an at risk daughter.

Now, these days, it’s no longer a one child policy, it’s a three child policy. So people think, “Oh, well, forced abortion is gone in China and there’s not a problem anymore.” Uh, not so, because why are they keeping any policy at all? I mean, China is desperate for babies.

They’re almost coercing eligible couples into having three children. So the new rule is every married couple is allowed to have three children. That means that if you’re not married, you can still be forcibly aborted in China. And if you have a fourth kid, you can still be forcibly aborted. 

Why are serving those the right to do that? They need to completely get rid of all coercive population control. I believe the reason that they are keeping this three child policy is to have the right to, I mean, the right in their eyes, under God they have no right to do this, but the right to abort single moms and fourth children just because that will keep the country in a state of terror. And number two, I think that they are using the three child policy as a hammer against disfavored minorities, such as the people who live in Xinjiang and also Tibet.

I don’t know. I can’t see any other reason that they continue to keep this. Other than that, they maybe are worried that they, you know, admit that they were wrong, but they’ve already pretty much admitted they’re wrong because they’re trying, they’re doing everything they can to just almost force people to have kids. So that’s an admission that the one child policy was wrong. 

So that’s what we’re doing with baby girls. But then we also came to realize that there are a lot of abandoned widows in the Chinese countryside where we are and I call them the invisible victims of the one child policy.

Under normal, traditional Chinese culture, a farming family, a farming couple would have a lot of kids, and those kids would have a lot of kids. They would farm and they would do all the other manual labor that they need to do to keep the family surviving. And then by the time the original couple was old,, first of all, elderly were venerated and they had a large family to support them. Now, these days, number one, the elderly are not venerated anymore. So under this godless Chinese Communist Party ideology, you’re only worth what you produce.

And if you spent your entire life producing, you know, you’ve produced children, you’ve worked a farm, you’ve done everything you could all your life, and now you’re old and you need somebody to help you. You’re just worthless. You’re like a useless eater. And they really do not support the elderly in China. And they have a huge problem with elder suicide in China, especially among, elderly Chinese women in the countryside. And then because of the one child policy, these women don’t have kids to support them. 

So, what we do is we go to their doors and we say, “You are a human being created by God in his image, and we understand you need help, so we’re going to help you.” And they’re like, “Well, what do you want in return?” Because never, under the Chinese Communist Party, this is very unusual for somebody to say, I want to help you because you need help.

And we say, “Well, what we want in return is we want you to be able to eat every day and to know that you’re loved.” And that’s it. And we support, we support the babies for like, a year, maybe two years. But the widows, we support for the rest of their lives.

And they are intensely grateful. And a lot of them are coming to believe in God, the widows and the mothers of the babies, because our network in China are very passionate Christians and they’re offering people help. And so many people have been baptized. A lot of people are going to church. So it’s a way that God is using us to save bodies and souls.

The Barefoot Lawyer Reports on China is proud to announce the publication of a report on Confucius Institutes and the Chinese Communist Party’s infiltration of American academic institutions. To read the report, which was published by the Catholic University of America’s center for Human Rights, please go to catholic.edu chr and visit our research and analyses page.