A baby girl was among hundreds of millions of babies aborted or abandoned during China’s one-child policy era, a law enforced between 1980 and 2016. Luckily, a kindhearted woman from the United States adopted her as a toddler. Grateful that her birth mom chose life, she now dedicates herself to the pro-life movement, advocating for change to protect unborn babies.
Shaohannah was born in the Guangxi autonomous region of Southern China and grew up in Minnesota after being adopted. Today, she lives just outside Washington, D.C., and works as the capitol area regional coordinator for Students for Life of America (SFLA) in the Washington metro area.
Talking to The Epoch Times, Shaohannah said that she was abandoned in a small box in the Guangxi region, in a city called Beihai, when she was only a few months old.
“I knew about China’s one-child policy for pretty much as long as I can remember,” she said. “The pressure that they put on people to have only one child, and especially in a male-driven society, to have a boy. I knew that I was one of the many girls who was abandoned and basically left to die because of the policy.”
In a coordinated effort to rescue unborn babies, Shaohannah will be actively participating in SFLA’s nationwide protests in March against over-the-counter sales of chemical abortion pills.
Dana Stancavage, SFLA’s press specialist and online editor and also Shaohannah’s friend and mentor, said: “This is such a dangerous drug to make over-the-counter accessible. It impacts our public waterways, it impacts women who are four times more likely to have injury infertility, and there’s an unfortunate rising death toll from using these pills … they certainly shouldn’t be at your local drugstore.”
Left to Die
Shaohannah has always felt sad about her origin story and has wondered what her life could have been like but harbors no resentment toward her birth family.
“I understand that in a country like China, there is a lot of pressure from the government,” she said. “The choices that they may have had to make might not have been the choices they would have wanted for me. But I’m very grateful for the fact that they chose an option where I was able to be rescued, and live.
“[My birth mom] gave me this gift in allowing me to have the life I have now. I wouldn’t have anything that I have right now if it was not for her, or her making the choices that she did, which I’m sure were not easy.”
Shaohannah’s adoptive mom, Sheila, was single but looking to have a child when she began the process of overseas adoption through Minnesota Children’s Home Society. China was the obvious choice as Sheila had previously studied abroad in China and had fallen in love with the Chinese people.
She was connected with Shaohannah at her orphanage when the baby girl was a little over a year old.
As far as Shaohannah knows, her birth family is still in China, but she has not yet been successful in connecting with them through genetic testing. However, she has met other adults who were once abandoned during the enforcement of China’s one-child policy. Many are women, like herself, who may have been given up because of their family’s preference for a boy.
From Abandoned to Advocate
As Shaohannah moved through high school and college, so her interest in activism increased. She planned to major in political science and worked in the Maryland General Assembly before transitioning into full-time work as a pro-life activist for SFLA.
SFLA holds rallies at the U.S. Supreme Court and has recently held a lobby day in Washington, D.C., for the Born Alive Protection Act. They assist daily on college campuses so that SFLA members can engage with pro-abortion students face-to-face and share information, such as Standing With You on campus, a nationwide directory to connect women with pregnancy resources, including adoption support.
In July 2022, when the D.C. Council was seeking to pass legislation to protect people who would have aided in any self-managed abortions and to protect anyone who participated in that, Shaohannah testified on behalf of SFLA and asked: “How much is a child like me worth?”
Shaohannah gave an example of a student whose view on abortion changed after a conversation at the SFLA campus stand.
She said: “I was hosting a display at Mount St. Mary’s University when we were approached by a couple of young women interested in the display. We asked them when they thought human rights should begin, and after looking at fetal models which demonstrate the humanity of preborn children, they agreed that abortion should not be legal through all nine months … we were excited to see these girls realize that the pro-life movement is here to offer support and life-affirming resources.”
In the controversial case of women who conceive in rape, Shaohannah knows her stance.
“We don’t assign grades to someone’s birth certificate based on the circumstances of how they were conceived,” she said. “Rape is horrible, it’s the worst thing that can happen to another person, but it does not make sense to turn around and commit another act of violence against another innocent person. If we wouldn’t discriminate and devalue a toddler who happened to be conceived in rape, we shouldn’t do the same to a preborn baby.”
‘Life Is a Gift’
Shaohannah says she has been bullied for her pro-life beliefs many times but keeps in mind that SFLA’s goal is to foster conversation and share scientifically-accurate information about preborn human lives. She believes in what she does.
“I love that I get to do something that I’m passionate about. I’m very blessed in that I have a wonderful team, and it’s a team of people who come from different backgrounds … but we can all unite around this fact that abortion ends human life, and we’re going to work to see abortion become unthinkable in our lifetime,” she said.
China’s one-child policy was officially retracted in 2016. According to Shaohannah, the Chinese Communist Party has claimed to have “prevented or ended” 300 million births, a figure she finds horrific since it’s “never, ever morally right in any circumstances to end lives.”
“It’s about this culture of death. They’ve created this devaluing of life in the womb, and we have that here as well. It’s not something new,” she said. “To me, that’s why part of this fight for preborn lives matters so much, because it’s taking a stand against this culture of death … desensitization and dehumanizing.
“[Roe v. Wade] was the roadblock that we got through in order to make abortion not only illegal but also make it unthinkable. We have a poster, a blueprint … we want women to feel supported because women don’t need abortion to succeed; they don’t need abortion in order to be equal. They can have their careers, their dreams, and their children too. But to do that, we need to support them.”
Shaohannah’s next battle is advocating for U.S. laws that protect preborn lives from the moment of conception. She is also preparing to take protest materials against the chemical abortion pill on a spring tour to college campuses around Maryland and Washington, D.C.
“A message that I want to convey is that life is a gift. It’s a gift that I’ve been given that I’m allowed to continue fighting for, and see it cherished more than it was when I was born,” she said.
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