Posted on 09/17/2005 11:53:41 PM PDT by Crackingham
Horrifying revelations of forced abortions and compulsory sterilisation in China embarrassed the Beijing government last week just as President Hu Jintao took the international stage. The exposure of practices that break China’s own laws governing birth control was the work of a blind man who has led a campaign to bring officials to justice for their crimes.
However, Chen Guancheng, 34, the campaigner, is under house arrest this weekend in Linyi, a city of 10m people where family planning officials have committed the worst abuses documented in recent years. All involve poor people in and around Linyi, which lies in Shandong province, some 400 miles southeast of Beijing. They have described brutal coercion that started last March when the local authorities panicked over the number of “unplanned births”.
Under Chinese regulations rural people may have more than one child if the firstborn is a girl or disabled. In Shandong, however, many women had given birth to more than two children. Lower-ranking Communist party officials were chastised for failing to enforce the law, a misdemeanour that often leads to dismissal or demotion. They reacted by launching a sweep through villages, rounding up people with more than two children. Pregnant women had forced abortions, while both men and women were compulsorily sterilised. According to numerous witnesses, the authorities held relatives and neighbours hostage, threatening them with torture so as to force victims to submit.
Detailed accounts given by Chen to US embassy officials and published by The Washington Post and Time magazine will cause outrage among conservative Christians and pro-life groups in the United States. The stories appeared as the Chinese president made his first official visit to the United States and spoke at the United Nations, where he faced protests about human rights. They are likely to force President George W Bush to put right to life on his agenda when he visits China in November. The stories collected by Chen are so disturbing that even Chinese officials in Beijing have called them “serious human rights violations”.
Women told how they were held down as doctors jammed needles into them to induce abortions in the seventh or eighth month of pregnancy. One victim, Li Juan, 23, told Time that she was in the ninth month of pregnancy when a group of men pinned her down on a bed in a local clinic and plunged a poison-filled syringe into her abdomen.
“At first I could feel my child kicking a lot. Then after a while I couldn’t feel her kicking anymore,” she is quoted as saying.
Li’s baby girl appeared to be dead on delivery, but just to make sure the officials held the infant in a bucket of water next to the bed for several minutes.
Hmmm....what else was expected out of a Communist state?
I am not at all surprised that existing laws are ignored. Communism always meant that.
Pray that China will be free some day. I will be long dead before that, but will wish the same even from hell or heaven where I end up.
Hillary is salivating.
crickets
Why again does China have MFN status?
The one child policy is not so rigorously enforced in China's rural territories. The further they are from Peking and the more "tribal", the less Peking (Beijing to you newbies) dares to enforce it. I would say some of these families are having three and four children
Saline injection abortions. The child dies a slow, excruciating death as her skin progressively disintigrates. "Safe" and legal in America, btw.
Because they contributed to Bill Clinton's '96 re-election campaign.
What evidence is there that the government were embarrassed, or that it cares at all?
hmmm. you tell me.............which is worse. same end--different means. In China, woman are forced to kill their children, in America, we do it voluntarily.
What the fuss is all about? After all we are only talking about a mass of tissue, right? /sarcasm off
Communist/Socialist/Liberal is exactly the direction the DeMARXocrat Democrats want America to become.
...and caused dead silence and the din of chirping crickets from the pro-choice, pro-privacy, pro-abortion, pro-NARAL, pro-Planned Parenthood, left...
Whatever happens in the privacy of a state-run Chinese hospital and a Chinese woman should be kept private. (BARF!)
. . . but look at the upside . . . 'always low prices' always wins over value . . .s
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.