Subject: Chinese Region "Must" Perform 20,000 Abortions to Meet Family Planning Goals
Source: London Telegraph; August 5, 2001

Chinese Region "Must" Perform 20,000 Abortions to Meet Family Planning Goals

Hong Kong -- A Chinese county has been ordered to conduct 20,000 abortions
and sterilizations before the end of the year after communist family
planning chiefs found that the official one-child policy was being
routinely flouted.

The impoverished mountainous region of Huaiji has ben forced to meet the
draconian target by provincial authorities in Guangdong (formerly known as
Canton).

Although the one-child policy is no longer strictly enforced in many rural
areas, officials in Guangdong issued the edict after census officials
revealed that the average family in Huaiji has five or more children.

Many of the abortions will have to be conducted forcibly on peasant women
to meet the quota. As part of the campaign, county officials are buying
expensive ultrasound equipment that can be carried to remote villages by
car.

By detecting which women are pregnant, the machines will allow Government
doctors to order abortions on the spot. At the Huaiji county hospital,
where most of the abortions will take place, women with unauthorized
pregnancies will face traumatic abortions in insanitary conditions.

Officials said that, as part of the drive to meet the quota, doctors had
been ordered to sterilize women as soon as they gave birth after
officially approved pregnancies. The drive to perform 20,000 abortions and
sterilizations in six months in a county with a population of fewer than
one million represents a heavy assault on the women of child-bearing age
in its population.

It is equivalent to the number of legal abortions that take place each
year in Hong Kong, a city with a population of seven million, where women
face no family planning restrictions.

Demographers believe that China has one of the highest rates of abortion
in the world, with estimates running at up to 80 abortions for each 1,000
live births. In Western Europe, the figure is just 10 abortions per 1,000
births.

Claiming to be strapped for funds, the local county leadership decided
that it could buy the ultrasound machines only if it withheld part of the
salaries of its 15,000 employees. One government official said: "We are a
very poor county. As our budget is very small, we don't have the money to
buy new equipment."

Employees of the county government have spoken out against the leaders who
have implemented the bizarre levy. Teachers, policemen and clerks, who
already find their 600 yuan (approx. $90) monthly stipend inadequate, now
have to support their families on half that amount.

One official said: "Party members and officials are people, too. We don't
know why we should pay for such a heartless drive."

Beijing's 20-year campaign to curb the country's population has had a
marked effect. The 2000 census produced a tally under 1.3 billion; the
number would have been much higher without the forced-abortion one-child
policy.

Sven Burmester, the United Nations Population Fund representative in
Beijing, said: "For all the bad press, China has achieved the impossible.
The country has solved its population problem."

That "bad press" has included reports of babies drowned in paddy fields by
officials. There was also the testimony of Gao Xiaoduan, a former family
planning official, who told an American congressional committee in 1998
that heavily pregnant women were often forced to have abortions.

Most recently, a woman was reported to have died while trying to escape
from officials who were attempting to sterilize her.

Many of the abortions carried out by the hated Family Planning Association
are forced on women, sometimes as late as eight and a half months into
pregnancy. The most common method of inducing birth is to inject a saline
solution into the womb.

Abortion in Guangdong is increasing sharply as a result of a combination
of a new campaign to strengthen implementation of the one-child policy and
a trend for young women in the cities to have multiple abortions from an
early age as a form of birth control.

Hospitals use the abortions to generate cash both from local women and
visitors from neighbouring Hong Kong who think it is easier to travel
across the border and pay for the abortion than to go through the
regulations required under the laws of the former British colony.

The abortion facilities catering for Hong Kong and Chinese city-dwellers
are a far cry from the primitive facilities in Huaiji. Dozens of young
women sit restlessly on benches waiting for their names to be called. Once
inside, they are given a general anaesthetic before undergoing the
10-minute abortion.

Within hours, they are back on the streets or boarding the train back to
Hong Kong. If they went to the Hong Kong Family Planning Association, they
would have background checks and be allowed to go through a waiting
period.

There are no such time-consuming demands in southern China, where abortion
is not considered an ethical issue. In Hong Kong, they would also have
been offered counselling, something that the doctors in China claim that
there is no demand for.