Is Chen Guangcheng 'Pro-Life'?

When DJ! wrote about Chen Guangcheng, he was largely unknown beyond fetus fetishists and China-watchers.

Now he's the subject of some delicate negotiations between the US and China.

But is he really 'pro-life' as we in the blighted New Republic of Gilead understand it?

According to Lindsay Beyerstein, nope.

Anti-abortion news and opinion websites have taken to calling Chen a “pro-life dissident,” which is fundamentally misleading. Chen is not opposed to abortion, per se, he is opposed to forced abortion. Though he’s been described as an opponent of the One Child policy, he hasn’t campaigned to overturn the law. In fact, unlike most Chinese dissidents, Chen’s target is not the central government; he wants to enlist Beijing’s help to enforce the law of the land and to check the power of local government officials who have terrorized him and the women of his community for years.

“I think it's important to note that he's not anti-abortion per se,” wrote Jin Zhao, a freelance journalist who blogs at Things You Don’t Know About China. “He is critical of the local authorities' forced abortions which he believes to have violated women's rights.”

That seems straightforward enough, doesn't it?

Nope. The lying liars are continuing to bleat about 'pro-abort' Clinton and Obama not helping the heroic baby-saver with the complicity of the 'liberal press' in what Beyerstein calls 'the pro-life spin cycle' and 'the perfect dog whistle'.

Where, oh where are the feminists?????

Right here.

The anti-abortion movement isn’t alone in its admiration for Chen. In a post on Feministing, one of the most influential feminist blogs on the web, Lori Adelman argued for a more precise label: “More apt than the whitewashed ‘human rights activist’ label he’s been given in the news is ‘reproductive rights activist’ and perhaps even ‘feminist.’”