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Robertson Seeks to Clarify Stand on Abortions in China

Comments follow his apparent backing of Beijing's forced-abortions policy and expressed concern for Chinese 'racial purity.'
By Beliefnet News Services



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VIRGINIA BEACH, Va., April 18 -- Pat Robertson, a leader of the national anti-abortion movement, has issued a statement expressing his strong opposition to forced abortions performed on women in China -- a day after making comments that infuriated other Christian conservatives.

Robertson released the statement Tuesday to clarify remarks he made in an interview broadcast Monday night on CNN's ``Wolf Blitzer Reports.''

Referring to Beijing's "forced-abortions" policy deployed to limit family size, Robertson said in the interview that Chinese leaders are ``doing what they have to do'' to control population growth, and that the United States should not interfere.

``If every family over there was allowed to have three or four children, the population would be completely unsustainable,'' Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition, said in the interview.

Robertson appeared to voice more concern with the threat to "racial purity" resulting from the forced-abortion policy than to the policy itself.

"It's going to be a demographic catastrophe," he said. "When they're having abortions, they're picking the girl babies for the slaughter, and they're allowing only the males to be born. And in another, say, 10 or 20 years, there's going to be a critical shortage of wives. The young men won't have any women to marry. So it will, in a sense, dilute the -- what they consider -- the racial purity of the Han Chinese. And that to them will be a great tragedy because then they will have to be importing wives from Indonesia and other countries in order to fill up the population."

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The Associated Press contributed to this story.

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