China's one-child policy didn't happen overnight — it was normalized through propaganda, and serves as a warning against countries trying to control reproductive rights.
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00:00In an effort to protect its people from starvation, China has enacted a policy limiting families
00:05to just one child.
00:16I was born in China in 1985, a time when China's population crisis was making headlines around
00:23the world.
00:36If women gave birth to their first child within a month, they would be forced to have a sterilization.
00:42And if women were caught to have a second child during the pregnancy, they would be
00:48forced to have an abortion.
00:51However, at some point, when the government realized that they could actually make profit
00:56through the international adoption program, they allowed the women to carry the baby for
01:01term, gave birth, and then would take the baby away and put it into the orphanage.
01:10I never even questioned why the policy was there and whether it was necessary or what
01:23consequences it had.
01:25It just became part of a normal life.
01:27So it was only until later when I moved to the US and I became a mother myself, it made
01:35me question what it must be like for women who lived under the policy and couldn't protect
01:42their child, didn't know what would happen when they were pregnant.
01:46That's when I started having a lot of questions.
02:05There were a lot of interviews that felt really difficult emotionally, especially because
02:19these were people who were talking about their children died or their pregnancy being terminated.
02:30For example, one midwife who was 84 years old, she told me that she's performed 50,000
02:38and 60,000 abortions and sterilizations, and she still feels guilt to this day.
02:48She told me how sometimes a late-term baby would be born alive and she would have to
02:53kill the baby alive.
02:55Those moments were extremely difficult to even listen to.
02:59I really learned a lot about propaganda.
03:01It's something that I was really familiar with because I lived in the environment, but
03:08I never paid attention to the songs, the movies, the books, the cartoons, the drawings, the
03:14paintings.
03:15All of those were designed to shape our minds and tell us how to think.
03:23In a society that is freer than China, it could be even more difficult to recognize
03:30propaganda because they exist in a more subtle way in the TV reports, in social media feeds,
03:37in political campaigns.
03:39We hope that this film would remind people to examine the messages around them.
03:44We also hope that the film could show people what would happen when a government takes
03:49away the choice from women, especially women's reproductive rights.
03:55And that's something also not unique in China.
03:58It's happening here in the U.S. too, as the governments restrict access to abortion and
04:05trying to control women's own reproductive rights.