Roger Marsh: Scripture repeatedly commands us as believers to defend the powerless and oppressed and stand up for justice. That calling has never been more appropriate than to address what is happening today in communist China. Every day, millions of babies are victims of what is known as gendercide, the killing of a pre-born life simply because of the gender of the baby. Millions of babies are being senselessly murdered under this oppressive two-child policy that leads to gendercide. This evil gendercide must not be tolerated.
Hello, everyone, I'm Roger Marsh, and this is a special edition of Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk. In just a moment, you're going to hear Dr. Tim Clinton's conversation with Reggie Littlejohn, founder of Women's Rights Without Frontiers. They'll examine the horrific figures of gendercide in China, before Reggie talks about the meaningful work her organization is doing. Now before we begin, the discussion you're about to hear deals with a very disturbing and mature subject matter. For that reason, parental discretion is strongly advised. Here now is Dr. Tim Clinton on this edition of Family Talk.
Dr. Clinton: Reggie, thank you for stopping by Family Talk. We're in Washington D.C., national Right to Life March going on, and it's been an amazing time. I don't know what you've sensed, but I've been pretty blown away at the energy and I think the progressive nature of what's happening with this movement. There's an uprising going on. There's a stirring going on. It seems like they're really starting to win at a very significant level. Are you seeing that?
Reggie Littlejohn: Oh, absolutely. I think it's a huge shot in the arm that President Trump came and spoke at the March for Life yesterday.
Dr. Clinton: Yeah, that was stunning.
Reggie Littlejohn: The thing that's really interesting about this is that the pro-life movement is really capturing the heart of the youth, and so that the so-called feminists are finding themselves to be the elder ones and the ones who are just almost on their way out. Because it's the youth that are really carrying this movement forward, and that gives a lot of hope to the movement.
Dr. Clinton: You've been pretty active in this movement. You're founder and president of Women's Rights Without Frontiers. We're going to talk about that. It's an international coalition, again, to expose and oppose forced abortion, gendercide, and sex slavery, in China in particular. We're going to talk a lot about China today.
Everybody's got a story. Everybody's got a little narrative and I was reading about you and I was fascinated with it. You've got a lot of personality. You've got a little spunk to you, and I think that's probably why God's placed you in a unique place. But let's go back a little bit. Well, let's do this. Tell us a little bit about what's going on in your ministry, your efforts, and then we'll talk about your personal story.
Reggie Littlejohn: All right. What's going on right now is our organization is leading the movement to end forced abortion and the sex-selective abortion of baby girls in China, and we're also posed to expand to India. We're hoping to do that, but that's for this year and next year. We also save abandoned widows that are just suffering and committing suicide, actually, in rural China. We are the only organization in the world that has boots on the ground inside of China, that is actively saving baby girls from sex-selective abortion and abandoned widows from complete hopelessness. That's what makes us really unique. I also have an international advocacy campaign. I have testified eight times at the US Congress and all over the world.
Dr. Clinton: I was amazed at the places you've given testimonies, it's stunning. And you're moving the needle. This isn't something that you're talking about, I mean, you're getting stuff done. That's what's so impressive.
Reggie Littlejohn: Right. The thing that I am really grateful to God about is that we have been able to actually save hundreds of baby girls in China from sex-selective abortion, and we have more widows because there are so many abandoned widows. But also in terms of moving the needle, when China moved from a one-child policy to a two-child policy, one of the reasons they gave was international criticism. I guess then because of the one-child policy and being one of the ones who's been the most vocal critic against the one-child policy and the atrocities, we felt very vindicated and affirmed in our international advocacy. I just want to say to the listeners, it's really important for people to understand: forced abortion is continuing in China under the two-child policy. The way that this was announced was that China abandons the one-child policy as though what they were doing was abandoning all coercive population control. That's not true. What is true is that the new rule is that every couple is allowed to have two children, which means if you're not a member of a couple, if you're a single mom, you can still be forcibly aborted, and third children are still forcibly aborted. I can give a couple of examples of that since the institution of the two-child policy. That battle is not over.
Dr. Clinton: I want to introduce our audience to you. I was thinking, as I was looking over everything that you've got going on and the voice God's given to you, "This is a unique person, and there's got to be some stuff in there that really drives her." I went back and I'll start about age 16. You announced to your mom and dad that you're an atheist, and every parent is like, "What?" Take us back there. There was something going on that was birthed down inside. You were battling, you were doing something.
Reggie Littlejohn: Well, when I was a really little kid, I was absolutely a believer. I remember through the dimpled glass on the bathroom window one morning and seeing the sun shine through and seeing it break into the spectrum of the rainbow and just thinking, "There's got to be a God." But then when I was 16 years old, I was pretty rebellious. I don't know if you can possibly imagine that.
Dr. Clinton: I have a friend who said, "Teenagers are crazy." You know what I mean? But it's a phase of life where you're trying to figure it all out.
Reggie Littlejohn: Yeah, so-
Dr. Clinton: How to fit in this big world.
Reggie Littlejohn: I figured the biggest way that I could rebel against my parents was to declare my atheism, and which I did. I said, "I'm an atheist. I'm not going to church with you anymore." They just sat there stunned. I actually wrote them a letter, which I had my father read out loud. And so then they didn't force me to go to church, so I became an atheist. I was the kind of atheist that would stay up with you till three in the morning arguing that there is no God. I was a belligerent atheist.
Dr. Clinton: Somehow I've got a feeling that I can see that in you.
Reggie Littlejohn: So, then I went to college and in college as a part of a college course on ancient literature, I had to read the gospel of John as part of ancient literature, and I'd never read the gospel of John before. I never read hardly any scripture before. I don't remember ever cracking a Bible when I was growing up. And when I was reading the gospel of John, I became captivated by the person of Jesus. He just seemed like an extremely captivating person, and I just thought to myself, "This is not what I rejected. I mean, this is not what I rejected." So I moved from being an atheist to being an agnostic, all right?
Dr. Clinton: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Reggie Littlejohn: Then when I met my future husband and just fell Head Over Heels in love with him, and I just remember looking into his eyes and just thinking to myself, "I can't accept that the only explanation for this man is that he evolved from blue-green algae. There is something here that is transcendent." So then I became a deist, and then we traveled around the world and I worked with Mother Teresa.
Dr. Clinton: I thought that was fascinating. You spent some time with her that really influenced you.
Reggie Littlejohn: Six weeks. She really was trying to get me to join her order. The only reason I didn't join her order was because I was married. If I hadn't been married, I probably would have joined her order, and I would have had a very different life. A wonderful life, but very different life. But when I worked with Mother Teresa and we worked with her for six weeks and she happened to be in Calcutta the entire time we were there-
Dr. Clinton: Really?
Reggie Littlejohn: Yeah, I became a Christian. I returned to the Christian church. I've been raised Catholic, and I went to a Catholic church working with her. I can't even explain it, but in that church, and I believe I was the only person in the church, I just felt this return of innocence. Because I'd become such a jaded person and so sarcastic and so just the way I was when I was an atheist. Jaundiced. Just in that church, there was like this ray of innocence that came back to me, and it reconnected me to that little girl looking out the window and seeing the little dimpled sunlight coming out as rainbows.
Dr. Clinton: Where you met the Christ of the gospel of John.
Reggie Littlejohn: Yeah.
Dr. Clinton: Yes. And a beauty began to radiate inside of you.
Reggie Littlejohn: Right.
Dr. Clinton: And you took off. By the way, you went to Yale Law School, became a litigator, got involved in all kinds of work. And then some things happen in your life, your family, there's some breast cancer in there, and you went through an experience that really even moved you to a new place, which birthed a mission in you. Do you mind sharing some of what happened there?
Reggie Littlejohn: As an attorney, as a litigator, I was a complex commercial and intellectual property litigator but on a pro bono basis, I represented a couple of Chinese refugees in their cases for political asylum in the United States. The first refugee was someone who had been forcibly sterilized and persecuted as a Christian. This was the mid-nineties. At that time, I knew that China had a one-child policy. I'd never stopped to think how it was enforced. This woman, who was tiny, she was maybe five feet tall, maybe weighed a hundred pounds and just looked like a China doll, they literally dragged her out of her home, screaming and crying and pleading and held her down to a table and cut her open and tied her fallopian tubes without anesthesia. She said it felt like somebody was taking a blow torch inside of her. She said the pain was indescribable.
And then sure enough, she ended up with a massive infection, which caused chronic back pain, chronic abdominal pain, and chronic migraines for the rest of her life. This is what revealed to me the course of enforcement of the one-child policy. Some other things happened. At that time in my life, my goal was to become partner.
Dr. Clinton: Sure.
Reggie Littlejohn: I wanted to be a partner in a law firm and when I was thinking about my future it was like, "I'm going to be a-
Dr. Clinton: Every attorneys dream.
Reggie Littlejohn: Yeah, every attorney's dream. My thought was, "I'm going to be a partner in a law firm and I'm going to supervise associates and they're going to do political asylum work." Right? God had a different plan for me, which is that we discovered these breast lumps and because of my family history of breast cancer, I was advised and I decided to have something called prophylactic mastectomies, which is where you have your breast removed, not because you have a diagnosis of cancer, but because you have an issue that is undiagnosable. I had 21 lumps, the doctor said, "I can't biopsy 21 lumps."
Anyway, it was a good thing I did this because what I had was lobular carcinoma in situ, which is a form of cancer, but it's not invasive yet. It's preinvasive cancer. If I had not done that, I would have gotten breast cancer. I did that in order to spare my life from breast cancer, but unfortunately at the same time, I got one of these MRSA infections. And so instead of the two months off that you would expect from having mastectomies, I ended up being completely knocked off my horse and was disabled for five years because of that infection.
Dr. Clinton: Five years.
Reggie Littlejohn: Yeah. And so I went overnight from being somebody who was a high-powered litigation attorney to somebody who was flat on my back, just begging God to spare my life. I prayed to God, "If you spare my life, I ask that you would make it to have some meaning." Because I can't even tell you the number of times I was pulling all-nighters at this law firm fighting on behalf of some big company, and the whole thing that was at issue was just money. I would think to myself, "Gosh, I wish I could be pouring this kind of energy into something that would actually mean something in the world, that would be important to save lives, to save souls, to save anything. I prayed to God, I said, "Please, Lord, break my heart for whatever breaks your heart." He immediately broke my heart for the women in China and the babies in China who were being forcibly aborted at that moment. That was the birth of our efforts to save the women's and babies in China.
Dr. Clinton: It's amazing how God works. Amazing. China, let's go there. For a lot of Americans, China's over there, but we hear a lot of stories about China. What do you love about China? How did God, or what did he do in your heart toward the people of China?
Reggie Littlejohn: When you say China, there's two things you're referring to. One is the Chinese Communist Party, which is oppressing the people of China. I can't think of anything I love about the Chinese Communist Party. I mean, they have killed hundreds of millions of their own people. That is the hallmark of communism, is the peace time killing of your own population. Through the one-child policy, they have eliminated over 400 million lives. But the people of China are very oppressed. The women of China, all they want to do is just to mind their own business and have children and love children. The traditional Chinese culture is very affirming of children. In the countryside, people would have huge families and everybody loved children. And so then the women and the men are just having their hearts ripped out by this forced abortion that's happening over there.
Dr. Clinton: In that narrative that's unfolding in your life, and you seeing what's going on over there, this preparation from law school to understanding the international rights issue, challenges for women, et cetera, and knowing what you've gone through, you can see how the passion begins to surge inside of you and where you're going. The whole human rights violation and more, talk to us about how it becomes really significant for you and how you begin to communicate that as something significant that we here stateside and around the world need to understand. Why does this really become important to us? How do we absorb this? Because that's one of the things I want to help people understand, we've got to have conversation with purpose, not just, "Let's just hear about China." It's like some missionary coming into the old church and showing these pictures and we would leave church and were like, "What was that about?" I mean, there's something going on here that's important. This becomes inherently personal for all of us.
Reggie Littlejohn: Okay, there's two answers to this question. Number one is, if we love God, we need to care about what God cares about.
Dr. Clinton: That's right.
Reggie Littlejohn: God doesn't just care about Americans. God cares about the whole world. God cares about China and the people of China who are living in probably the second-most repressive regime in the world. Number one, being North Korea. Especially the Christians in China are being terribly persecuted, and this is breaking God's heart. Remember my prayer, "God break my heart for whatever breaks your heart." Of course, abortion in America breaks God's heart. But you know what? Abortion in China also breaks his heart. In the United States, we've had about 60 million abortions since the Roe V Wade decision. Now, a long time ago, like maybe 10 years ago, the Chinese government stated that they had prevented 400 million lives through the one-child policy. I bet you anything it's 500 million by now, half a billion people. This breaks God's heart, and if we love God, we've got to care about the Chinese people.
Now, another difference between the United States and China is that in the United States, we have freedom of speech. You're here for the March for Life, right? How many fantastic American speakers are there that are really speaking out powerfully about any aspect of abortion in the United States? You say something against the one-child policy in China, or the two child policy or coercive population control, and you are going to be jailed. You are going to be tortured. Your family is going to be persecuted. They don't have freedom of speech. People say to me, "Well, why don't you care about abortion in America?" Of course, I care about it, but you know what? For me, for every person who's speaking about forced abortion in China, there's a thousand who are speaking about abortion in America. Besides the fact that we're talking about elective abortion here and forced abortion there.
Dr. Clinton: You're listening to Family Talk, a production of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. I'm your host, Dr. Tim Clinton, president of the American Association of Christian Counselors and executive director of the James Dobson Family Institute. Thanks for joining us. By the way, thanks for supporting us. Find out more about what's happening at Family Talk and with Dr. Dobson and our team at drjamesdobson.O-R-G, drjamesdobson.org.
I'm speaking today with Reggie Littlejohn. She's a pro-life activist and president of Women's Rights Without Frontiers. It's an amazing story. We're going to talk more about China and the calling and mission that God's put in her heart. It's stunning, what's happening. It's important that we learn about this. By the way, step into this moment, get involved. Let's raise a generation who learns to care about the world and more. Reggie, I'm going to go back to three words related to your international coalition. I think they're really important. Your goal is to expose and oppose forced abortion. Tell us what's happening in terms of forced abortion, again, clearly what's happening in China.
Reggie Littlejohn: Under the two-child policy, every couple is allowed to have two children. Single women are still subject to forced abortion, and third children are still subject to forced abortion. That's one kind of forced abortion, that's government forced abortion. I mean, just as an example, a woman who is a Uyghur, she was living in China but she married somebody from over the border. They're allowed to have three children. She was living with her husband. She was pregnant with her third child. She went back to China to give up her Chinese citizenship because she was wanting to become a citizen of the Uyghur nation in Eastern Turkmenistan. She comes over the border, and the Chinese government says, "You're pregnant with your third child." She says, "Yeah, but I don't live here. I'm giving up my citizenship. I'm going back." And they said, "You have a third child." And they forcibly aborted her third child.
Dr. Clinton: Wow.
Reggie Littlejohn: So that's government-enforced abortion. Now, the second kind of forced abortion is enforced by the family. This is the where the gendercide comes in.
Dr. Clinton: Yeah, gendercide being the second key issue that you guys really focus on. What's happening in China here?
Reggie Littlejohn: Right, so gendercide is another species of forced abortion because these women are being forced to abort baby girls when they don't want to. But they're not being forced by the government, they're being forced by their families. For example, there was a couple that had their one child under the one-child policy. It was a girl. They were one and done. Then China moved to a two-child policy. The husband said, "Oh, great. Let's have a second child. Let's have a boy." He forced his wife to abort four baby girls in a year, and she died. That's forced abortion by the family, not the government.
Even under the two-child policy, especially second daughters are still at very high risk because there's brutal son preference in China and elsewhere. China is not the only country that has son preference. China is the only country that has this low coercive birth limit of two, so if a couple has a girl for the first baby, they're more or less - let her live because they can have a boy on the second baby, and then many couples will just abort again, and then again and again until they get that boy on the second child.
Dr. Clinton: The sex slavery issue, address that for us too. Help us understand how that fits into your work with this international coalition and why it's significant to this discussion.
Reggie Littlejohn: Because of the sex-selective abortion of baby girls, there's an estimated 30 to 40 million more men living in China than women. And because of this extreme gender imbalance, China is a major country that is trafficking women from most of the surrounding nations into China to be forced brides and sex slaves.
Dr. Clinton: It's horrifying when you really think about what's going on.
Reggie Littlejohn: There's something every year that the US government puts out, it's called the Trafficking in Persons Report, the TIP Report. In the TIP Report for 2019, China was demoted to the lowest level as a tier three nation because they actually supply women to other countries, there are women trafficked out of China to other countries, and also a major destination of trafficking, and the government is not reaching international standards to do anything about it. I believe, this is my opinion, I believe the reason the government is not doing as much as they should be doing about it to stop it, is that they know they've got these 30 to 40 million excess males, and if they don't have trafficked women, they're going to have insurrection on their hands. I believe that they are complicit with it.
Dr. Clinton: Wow. For most Americans, their introduction to, or knowledge of sex slavery is the movie Taken or something. They're watching that and it terrifies them and they don't want to go to Mexico or something like that, but they have no idea what's happening around the globe. When you come into a place like China, it's beyond the pale, isn't it?
Reggie Littlejohn: Well, in the most recent... There's something called the Congressional Executive Commission on China, and they issue a human rights report every year. Their human rights report came out January 9th, just very recently. In that human rights report they said that there are cases of women in foreign countries who are pregnant, who are coming to China to have their babies, to sell their babies in China. That's how desperate the situation is.
Dr. Clinton: Really?
Reggie Littlejohn: They mentioned Vietnam as being a particular nation where pregnant women will come into China to have their babies and sell their babies on the black market.
Dr. Clinton: There would probably be for some who are listening like, "You're kidding me. How could you even possibly begin to make a difference in China?" Yet God is at work. God's doing things. Efforts like what you're doing through Women's Rights Without Frontiers, that that story has to be told. By the way, who knows? Who may raise up the next Reggie Littlejohn to step into China who may be listening to a broadcast? When we come back, Reggie, I want to ask you to stay. I want to do another program with you because what's amazing here is this narrative of God being at work is so true. And so would you stay with us and join us for our next broadcast? We'd love to have you?
Reggie Littlejohn: Yes, I would be honored.
Dr. Clinton: What a fascinating program. Thank you for joining us.
Reggie Littlejohn: Thank you.
Roger Marsh: A powerful program about the outrageous and evil practice of forced abortion happening in China right now. Be sure to listen in again to tomorrow's broadcast for the conclusion of Dr. Tim Clinton's interview with Reggie Littlejohn. In the meantime, visit today's broadcast page at drjamesdobson.org. for more information about Reggie Littlejohn's organization, Women's Rights Without Frontiers. You can see and read about the impact this group is having on our world. That's drjamesdobson.org, and then tap onto the Broadcast icon at the top of the page. Well, that's all the time we have for today. Be sure to join us again next time as Reggie Littlejohn shares the progress being made to save oppressed lives in China. I'm Roger Marsh, and I hope you'll join us again tomorrow for another edition of Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk.
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