Chinese Netizens Wild with Fury As Another Forced Abortion of 7-Month-Old Baby Happens Again
Chinese netizens are now wild with fury after reports with accompanying photographs showing a 7-month-old baby forcibly aborted out of his mother's womb by Chinese family planning authorities went viral over the weekend.
The forced abortion resulted because the parents were already over-quota as per China's one child policy. However, it was unclear as to why the forced adoption still managed to occur despite a national and provincial ban forbidding late-term abortions has been instituted since June 2012.
In a story originally carried by LifeNews.com, the 33-year old pregnant mother, known only through a surname Lü, were dragged by local family planning officials on Friday to the local hospital on the tip of an informant of her disobedience to the one child policy.
Under the watchful eye and authority of a certain Mr. Cui, a local Family Planning Official, hospital staff injected a needle into the woman's uterus to kill the baby inside as well as to induce labor. The mother eventually gave birth to the already dead baby on March 24. The baby was a boy.
"What had this baby done wrong, to be tortured to death in such an unimaginable way?" a netizen identified as @98zhongjilongqishi was quoted by Radio Free Asia.
Under China's one-child policy, families are only allowed to have one child, with the exception if the eldest child was a girl. But this exception is normally allowed only in the rural areas. Apart from forced adoptions and sterilizations, the policy is likewise enforceable through the imposition of fines that oftentimes amount to several times over a family's income.
There must be good business in imposing fines as based on recent official data gathered by Radio Free Asia, 31 provinces and cities in China were able to collect up to US$4.4 billion annually just from enforcing the one-child policy.
"Most people at the grass-roots of society are against it, while people higher up the social ladder are not," Xu Xiang, founder of the rights website "I Want Justice," said.
"They have ways and means of having a second or a third child if they want to," he said. "Officials often have kids with their mistress or their lover, and those kids immediately get their household registration papers."
China's one child policy, it seems, is just nothing to China's richest people who can very much afford to pay the heavy fines.
"A fine of 20,000 or 30,000 yuan (US$3,220 or US$4,830) is chicken-feed to them," Mr Xu said. "But for ordinary Chinese, it's hard enough just managing to get married and have a kid at all...and the family planning policies for them are very intrusive."
Since being adopted in the 1970s, China's one child policy had paved the way for a total of 196 million sterilizations and 336 million abortions, or 1,500 abortions per hour per day in the last four decades.
"In China, any baby that hasn't yet been born isn't counted as a life," Hu Tao, a Guangzhou doctor, told Radio Free Asia in an interview on Tuesday.
"But from an ethical point of view, if the baby has already formed, it doesn't matter how old it is; it is a human life," he said.
"To abort it when it has already developed is tantamount to murder."
U.S.-based rights group ChinaAid had been able to talk to the husband, whose identity remains unknown.
"(My wife) is doing okay physically," he said. "The government has already stepped forward to negotiate this matter, and the government right now is in the middle of discussions. (We) haven't yet (hired) a lawyer. If the government does not compromise, I'll call you!"
The national and provincial ban forbidding late-term abortions was implemented following the high-profile case of Feng Jianmei, whose 7-month-old baby was likewise forcibly terminated by Family Planning Officials in June 2012.