Cardinal Martino And Chai Ling: Gendercide Must And Can Be Ended

The Honorary President of the Dignitatis Humanae Institute, His Eminence Cardinal Renato Raffaele Martino, met Wednesday with Chai Ling, the founder of All Girls Allowed. The organization aims to restore life, value, and dignity to girls and mothers by exposing the injustice of China’s One-Child Policy that leads to gendercide.

Ling was a key student leader in the 1989 Tiananmen Square movement and has twice been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

After today’s meeting, which was organised in joint collaboration with the US-based NGOs Parliamentary Network for Critical Issues and Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, Cardinal Martino said, “Due to China’s traditional preference for boys, many parents will go to extraordinary means to make sure that their one child is male. Often this means sex-selective abortion – an atrocity that has become extremely common across the country and yet is hardly known in the wider world. Many girls are also abandoned.”

“This enormous loss of life has inflicted deep scars on the Chinese population that has led to a very serious gender imbalance and a marked increase in human trafficking to make up for the shortage of girls,” said Martino adding, “In the face of these deeply disturbing facts, it was a great privilege to meet Chai Ling today who is doing such excellent work in alerting the world of this appalling blight on human dignity. It is also important to note that this terrible phenomenon takes place not only in China, but also in other countries.”

For her part, Chai Ling said, “It was a great honor to meet today His Eminence Cardinal Renato Raffaele Martino who has done so much to help the needs of children, both through his Alessandro and Teresa Martino Foundation and now with the Dignitatis Humanae Institute.”

“His successful efforts in the 1990s to build a multinational alliance to resist an international right to abortion gives us hope that his work and prayers will similarly help form a global alliance against gendercide,” said Chai Ling.

Chai Ling said that “All Girls Allowed is devoted to ending the systematic killing of girls simply because they are girls – an atrocity that has cost the lives of 160 million females. Today, 120 boys are born for every 100 girls in China, resulting in 37 million more men than women in the country – an imbalance that poses a direct threat to peace and security.”

“China’s One-Child Policy, and the gendercide it fosters, are an appalling attack on the dignity of the human person that we believe must and can be ended within a generation,” Chai Ling said.