On China’s “one child” policy – China now allows 2 children, but forced abortions continue.
“Insider accounts of China’s family planning program have been rare – and are always published under pseudonyms – no doubt for fear of government reprisals…., a Chinese journalist (“Liu Yin”) was allowed to accompany the members of a family planning “task force” on a daily raid whose mission was to arrest eleven women who had become pregnant without authorization. Her account, which was published in a British newspaper, describes how five of the women were forcibly dragged from their homes in the middle of the night and taken to the county hospital. The other six had fled, but their families were warned that “if [the women] did not go to the abortion center within a week their houses would be pulled down. This was no bluff. On the way back from the raid, I saw six collapsed houses. No family in the village is allowed to provide shelter for the people whose houses had been destroyed.”
Later, the journalist visited the hospital itself, where she saw “hundreds of women – some more than six months pregnant –… packed in dark corridors and makeshift tents, waiting to be operated on in the “abortion center” in the hospital courtyard. Next to it was a public toilet. I went in: there was simply nowhere you could put your feet; it was filled with bloodsoaked toilet paper. Behind the toilets stood a line of waste–bins: the aborted babies – some as old as eight months – were put there, then dumped somewhere else.”
The Independent, September 11, 1991
Stephen W Mosher A Mother’s Ordeal: One Woman’s Fight against China’s One Child Policy (Orlando, Florida: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1993) x–xi
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