Forced abortion highlights abuses in China policy

Published 9:35 am Thursday, January 9, 2014

BEIJING — When her mind is clear, Gong Qifeng can recall how she begged for mercy. Several people pinned her head, arms, knees and ankles to a hospital bed before driving a syringe of labor-inducing drugs into her stomach.

She was seven months pregnant with what would have been her second boy. The drugs caused her to have a stillborn baby after 35 hours of excruciating pain. She was forced to have the abortion by officials in China’s southern province of Hunan in the name of complying with national limits on family size.

“It was the pain of my lifetime, worse than the pain of delivering a child. You cannot describe it,” Gong, 25, said in a recent interview in Beijing. “And it has become a mental pain. I feel like a walking corpse.”

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Since the abortion more than two years ago, Gong has been diagnosed with schizophrenia. She traveled with her husband to the capital to demand help paying for her treatment, but she ended up being hauled away in her pajamas by police, a detention recorded on video by The Associated Press.

Forced abortions are considered an acceptable way of enforcing China’s population limits, but they are banned when the woman is more than five months pregnant. Yet no one has been held accountable for Gong’s late-termabortion, and other women in similar cases also struggle to get justice and compensation.

Observers believe forced late-term abortions are on the decline, though reports continue to surface. A British broadcaster reported one in the eastern province of Shandong in September.

Although China in November announced an easing of its “one-child” policy to allow more couples to have a second child, the overall system remains in place and local governments are still required to keep to population quotas. The new policy would not have applied to Gong because it allows couples to have a second child only if both the mother and father have no siblings.

“The system has not changed at all,” said Liang Zhongtang, a demographer at Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. “It still forbids you from having more children than permitted by the government, so the game — and forced later-term abortions — are unavoidable if you want to have children the government does not allow.”