On 9th November in Rome, the Honorary President of the Dignitatis Humanae Institute, His Eminence Cardinal Renato Raffaele Martino, met 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.
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.”
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.
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.”
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Notes to editors:
* The Dignitatis Humanae Institute aims to promote human dignity worldwide in both political and cultural spheres. Its basis is the “Universal Declaration of Human Dignity” which brings attention to the infinite value of every single human life based on the recognition that Man is made in the image and likeness of God. The Institute is a growing presence in parliamentary working groups on human dignity in legislatures around the world.
* All Girls Allowed is a US-based NGO which aims to expose the truth about the One-Child Policy and mobilize the global community to advocate against the cruel methods used to enforce the policy. It has four main priorities: ending gendercide by educating families and providing monthly stipends that ease the burden of having a baby girl; educating abandoned girls through scholarships; rescuing trafficked children through an online database and campaigns; and defending mothers by providing legal defense to forced abortion victims as well as mothers who are in danger of forced abortion or forced sterilization.
* The Alessandro and Teresa Martino Foundation was founded by Cardinal Martino in memory of his parents. It is dedicated to assisting poor, sick and disabled children through the financing of small projects in developing countries.
* “A Heart for Freedom“, Chai Ling’s autobiography, was published in October.
