BABY WOES IN CHINA
Chinese couple fights back against late-term forced abortions
THE small-town businessman wined and dined three government officials for permission to become a father.
But the Peking duck and liquor were not enough.
One night, a couple of weeks before she was due to give birth, Mr Yang Zhongchen's wife was dragged from her bed in a town in north China.
She was taken to a clinic where, she claims, her unborn child was killed by injection.
'Several people held me down, ripped my clothes aside and the doctor pushed a large syringe into my stomach,' claimed Ms Jin Yani, a shy, petite woman.
'It was very painful... It was all very rough.'
Some 30 years after China limited one child per family, resentment still brews over the state's regular and sometimes brutal intrusion into intimate family matters.
Second pregnancies are aborted and a licence is required even to have a first child.
Seven years after the dead baby was pulled from her body with forceps, Ms Jin remains traumatised.
She and a doctor say that she cannot bear anymore children.
The Yangs have made the rounds of government offices pleading in vain for compensation.
So this year, they took the unusual step of suing the family planning agency.
The judges ruled against them, saying they had conceived out of wedlock. Local family planning officials said Ms Jin consented to the abortion.
The couple's appeal to a higher court is pending.
The one-child policy applies to most families in this nation of 1.3billion people, and with officials often under pressure to meet birth quotas, empathy takes a back seat to the plight of some violators.
Back in 1998, Ms Jin was an 18-year-old high school dropout from a broken home. She met 30-year-old building materials supplier Yang and they moved in together.
In early 2000, they discovered MsJin was pregnant, but couldn't get married right away because she had not reached 20, the marriage age.
After her birthday in April, they were married on 5May.
All they needed was the piece of paper allowing them to have a child.
So about a month before MsJin's due date, Mr Yang set out to curry favour with the head of the neighbourhood family planning office in Anshan.
BABY PERMIT
He faced a fine between 5,000 and 10,000 yuan for not having a family planning permit in advance.
He treated the officials to a Peking duck lunch, hoping to escape with a lower fine since this was his first child. He did so again the next day.
The mood was cordial and the officials toasted him for finding a young wife and starting a family.
'They told me, 'We'll talk to our superiors. We'll do our best. Wait for our news.' So I was put at ease,' Mr Yang said.
But three weeks later, in September, when Mr Yang was away opening a new building supplies store, Ms Jin was taken from her mother-in-law's home and forced to abort the foetus.
Why had the officials failed to make good on their assurances? One of MrYang's two lawyers, MrWang Chen, said he believes it was because no bribe was paid.
'Dinner is not enough,' Mr Wang said. 'Nothing gets done without a bribe. This is the situation in China. Yang was too naive.'
Things have improved since a propaganda campaign in 1993 to make enforcement more humane and the enactment of the family planning law in 2001, he said. Controls have been relaxed, allowing couples in many rural areas to have two children under certain conditions.
The Yangs are suing the Family Planning Bureau in their county of Changli for 290,000 yuan ($58,500) in medical expenses and 1 million yuan for psychological distress.
But it's not about the money, said MrYang.
'What I want is my child and I want the court to acknowledge our suffering,' he said. - AP.
taken:
http://newpaper.asia1.com.sg/news/st...40407,00.html? 
