China shamed by forced abortions !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Daanyeer]

Source: timesonline.co.uk
September 18, 2005 Author: Michael Sheridan

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.

Women with two children who were not pregnant were thrown on to operating tables for sterilisations. Some doctors botched the procedure, leaving patients in permanent pain.

Chen, a self-taught legal activist who reacted to his own blindness by working on behalf of others, collected taped statements that added up to a catalogue of malpractice.

To some Chinese lawyers it recalled the medical abuses of imperial Japan against Chinese victims in the 1930s and 1940s. They helped Chen to draw up the first class-action lawsuit of its kind in China against the Communist party in Linyi.

In Beijing the state family planning commission opened an investigation and promised to punish any official who broke the law. The Linyi campaign was a clear violation of China’s legislation on family planning, passed in 2002, which had guaranteed citizens the right to make “an informed choice”.

The government has moved away from compulsion towards economic incentives for couples who have only one child and fines for those who have more. New regulations explicitly ban the use of force.

However, in his determination to bring Shandong’s party officials to book, Chen broke a political taboo. He travelled to Beijing, met American diplomats and talked to the US media. Reaction was swift.

On September 6 a group of men attacked him in Beijing and threw him into a car. The abductors were security officials from Linyi who had pursued Chen to the capital. They were obliged by Beijing police to release him and he was put on a train back to Linyi.

There he remains, by his own account under siege in his home. The police have rigged up lights to keep watch, ordered taxi drivers not to pick him up, seized his home computer and cut off his telephone.

[SoMaLiSiZz]

I feel Sick