We're Christians, and we run our business on Christian principles. I've always said that the first two goals of our business are (1) to run our business in harmony with God's laws, and (2) to focus on people more than money. And that's what we've tried to do. [...] We believe that it is by God's grace that Hobby Lobby has endured, and he has blessed us and our employees. [...] But now, our government threatens to change all of that. A new government health care mandate says that our family business MUST provide what I believe are abortion-causing drugs as part of our health insurance. Being Christians, we don't pay for drugs that might cause abortions, which means that we don't cover emergency contraception, the morning-after pill or the week-after pill. We believe doing so might end a life after the moment of conception, something that is contrary to our most important beliefs. It goes against the Biblical principles on which we have run this company since day one.

The policy is controversial for a number of reasons, but maybe the one that Americans hear about most is the practice of forcing abortions on mothers who become pregnant with an unapproved second child. And that may get to the biggest misunderstanding that most Americans have about the policy: why these things keep happening. As my Beijing-based colleague William Wan writes in an insightful explainer, "practices of forced abortions, infanticide and involuntary sterilizations [are] all banned in theory by the government," but they still happen. They're no longer frequent, but they do happen.

In July 2012, for example, a 23-year-old mother became pregnant with her second child. Local officials arrested her, seven months into her pregnancy, and demanded her family pay $6,000 in fines for violating the one-child policy. When the family couldn't get the money together, the officials gave her an injection that killed the baby, whom the mother delivered stillborn while in police custody. It became an international news story when the mother, outraged at her child's death and at the indignity of being forced to wait alongside the body, posted a gruesome photo of the scene on social media. In China, it generated a national debate over the question, Why is this still happening?