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Abortion Scandal in China

Evan Osnos, reporting from Beijing: China convulsed this week around the story of Feng Jianmei, a twenty-three-year-old expectant mother, who was escorted from a relative’s home in Shaanxi province by local family-planning officials, shoved into a van, and driven to a hospital. She was blindfolded and given a document to sign. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t see […]

Evan Osnos, reporting from Beijing:

China convulsed this week around the story of Feng Jianmei, a twenty-three-year-old expectant mother, who was escorted from a relative’s home in Shaanxi province by local family-planning officials, shoved into a van, and driven to a hospital. She was blindfolded and given a document to sign. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t see it; she knew why she was there. She had violated the one-child policy. Two shots were injected into her belly, and on the morning of June 4th she gave birth to a stillborn baby girl.

Afterward, while she lay on a metal-framed hospital bed, her sister took a devastating (and, be warned, graphic) photo: mother, beside the bloodied remains of her daughter. It electrified the country. By Thursday night, the topic had attracted a million comments on Weibo, the Chinese Twitter, and rage was mounting. China’s family-planning system has been “openly killing people for years in the name of national policy,” a commenter wrote on Clubkdnet.net. “What is wrong with society?” Li Chengpeng, a widely followed commentator, wrote, “A seven-month baby can think already. I want to ask the murderer, how do you face your own mother when you go home? If this evil policy is not stopped, this country will have no humanity.”

[Via Sullivan.]

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