Gaffe (n): The accidental telling of an embarrassing truth by a politician.

Yesterday, Joe Biden’s office tried walking back his stunning, toadying remarks on China’s one-child policy by claiming, as Allahpundit wrote, that he actually meant the exact opposite of his remarks.  His remarks were clear enough to give comfort and support to a regime that forcibly aborts children and sterilizes women to support their Malthusian policies, as I argue in my column for The Week today.  Biden and Barack Obama proudly campaigned on a pro-choice platform in 2008, but the China policy that Biden professes to “fully understand” allows no choice at all in the most intimate of human interactions:

Culturally, the imposition of this policy has pushed China’s women to abort girls, as sons have the traditional duty of caring for elderly parents. This has created an ugly gender imbalance in Chinese society to the extent that some call it a “gendercide.” The report, completed by the Congressional Executive Committee on China (CECC), links that to skyrocketing suicide rates for Chinese women, which run “three to four times” higher than that of men in the rural areas where these policies get enforced most brutally.

The one-child policy has created the need for massive government intervention into the most private of marital transactions, requiring women to have IUDs inserted and only removed with permission from the state. Children born “out of plan” get no “benefits” from the government, and their parents are barred from employment and have their papers seized. And “out of plan” doesn’t just refer to second pregnancies, as the report makes clear, but any pregnancy that occurs without express permission of the Chinese government.

Biden apparently didn’t read the recommendation of the CECC in confronting China over its murderous policies:

Urge Chinese officials to cease coercive methods of enforcing birth control quotas. Urge the Chinese government to dismantle coercive population controls and provide greater reproductive freedom and privacy for women.

Bear in mind that the CECC isn’t a panel dominated by conservatives. The Obama administration has five of its own representatives on the commission; five of the other eight members are Senate Democrats, led by liberal co-chair Sherrod Brown of Ohio. This policy recommendation maintains the credibility of the U.S., even for administrations that back abortion rights at home — when an administration bothers to listen to the counsel of its own advisers.

In fact, Biden did the exact opposite of the CCEC’s recommendations.  I’d suggest reading the CCECs annual report on China; it’s quite an eye-opening experience, especially on their implementation of the genocidal “one child” policy.  Local governments enforce the policy most strictly on “migrant workers,” a particularly vulnerable population with no community support at all, apparently as a means to ultimately get rid of the population.

Women in China have no choice over their bodies.  The state enforces its policy with a totalitarian regime that requires IUDs, aborts children, and tortures and maim women who attempt to exercise choice.  Biden’s professed “pro-choice” sensibilities have been exposed as pro-abortion with this shameful suck-up to Beijing on a policy that no US envoy should profess to “fully understand.”