China's Children of the Damned
By Melinda Tankard Reist, The Age, March 31, 1995
There has been international criticism of the Federal Government’s plans to disallow forced abortion and sterilization as grounds for refugee status. Melinda Tankard Reist interviews a Chinese doctor who says she has performed many forced abortions under China’s one-child policy.
They were dragged kicking and screaming to Dr Xiao Ying Wong’s hospital.
Only four or five weeks from giving birth, their hands and feet were tied to the table for the abortion Dr Wong had been ordered to perform.
Others, bowed and defeated after days of harassment and threats of fines, job losses or the destruction of their homes, came quietly, authorities at their side, for their "voluntary" abortions.
Dr Wong (not her real name) estimates she has performed at least 15,000 abortions in the seven years she worked at a hospital in Jiangsu province.
She killed almost full-term babies in the womb by lethal injection. She put babies who survived abortion into rubbish bins to die. And she saw another doctor plunge a hypodermic syringe into a baby’s brain through the soft spot on the skull as the head crowned at the point of birth.
Dr Wong, 34, received asylum in Australia on the grounds of fear of persecution under China’s population policy. She was first refused asylum by an immigration minister’s delegate in 1993, but won her appeal on religious grounds as a conscientious objector in April last year.
She is now safe, but many other Chinese women are not.
If Federal Parliament approves legislation, to be debated in the Senate in May, that will prevent asylum seekers applying for refugee status on the basis of fear of prosecution under China’s fertility control policy. Dr Wong is afraid that women facing abortion and sterilisation, and couples with more than one child will be returned and punished.
From 1983 to 1989, Dr Wong worked as an obstetrician and gynaecologist in China. She was just 23 when the family Planning Office ordered her to ensure the violators of China’s population control program were dealt with.
"You would not think mine is the face of a murderer," she says in her small Melbourne flat. A Melbourne psychiatrist has diagnosed her as suffering post-traumatic stress disorder. "She presents with symptoms of depression, guilt, vivid reliving of traumatic experiences and nightmares," the psychiatrist said. The Australian Red Cross described her as having "nervous eczema, disturbed behaviour and insomnia.
Xiao Ying entered medical school at 19. In 1983, with a degree in medicine, she received her first shock while on a training visit to a hospital.
"I saw the dead babies in the rubbish bin and I saw the blood, so much blood," she recalls. "But I didn’t think that it was an abortion, I think that maybe someone just lost her baby (miscarriage).
"My teacher pushed my hands down to force the needle into the womb. I could feel the baby’s body, I could feel it struggle."
"But then I saw the women giving birth to dead babies. I saw their suffering and pain. Some of the babies had their eyes open, sometimes they breathed, sometimes the baby boys would urinate, then die.
Dr Wong was sent to a hospital between the country and city to conduct abortions and sterilizations on women who had violated the one-baby quota. Other women who were unmarried or deemed too young, not married long enough or whose babies would exceed the quotas permitted by their work unit underwent abortions of their first children. Dr Wong says one in three abortions she performed were first pregnancies.
For Abortions after 19 weeks of pregnancy, a long needle filled with the abortifacient Rivalor was inserted through the abdomen into the womb. Contractions usually began and the woman was left to expel the baby.
Dr Wong vividly remembers the first time she did this. "My hands were shaking. My teacher pushed my hands down to force the needle into the womb. I could feel the baby’s body, I could feel it struggle."
Where abortions failed and the baby was expelled alive, which Dr Wong says was common, the baby would scream sometimes for two hours - before dying. Those who did not die quickly were put in a bin and covered. Dr Wong tried to find a place to bury them.
"I put many, many babies in the garden around the hospital," she recalls. "There was no money for a special (burial) place.
There were also no anaesthetics or pain killers for women undergoing abortions at Dr Wong’s hospital. There wasn’t time. "There’s not enough doctors and the doctor wants a dead baby, fast," Dr Wong says.
Women also suffered with the IUD’s they were made to have fitted following the birth of their first child. The women were X-rayed regularly to check the IUD was in place. Dr Wong was not permitted to remove them; this would have been a crime.
Medical teams were bused to the countryside for crackdowns on women pregnant with unauthorised children. Dr Wong recalls that in each village women rounded up by family planning workers were brought to them for abortions while other women and men were sterilized.
"If you don’t want an abortion, you have a big problem. In the countryside, they (the authorities) will pull down your house and sell your things to pay the fine." The fine depended on a couple’s money and possessions. A second child (unless authorized in cases where the first child was female or disabled) would be denied education medical care and other basic rights. "The second child has no rights, it’s illegal," Dr Wong says.
Many men were less distressed over their wife’s forced abortion if they knew the baby was a girl. "If he sees a boy (he says), ‘Oh my God!’ He picks up the dead baby, crying. He wants to beat the doctor, he wants to beat the family planning officer’.
"So we get experience. When the baby is born (aborted), we quickly take it out to the rubbish. Then we lie about the sex.'
For many women, it was important to prove they could bear sons — even though they knew the babies would be aborted. They wanted to save face with their husband’s families.
She says she felt it was impossible to leave her job. It was futile to complain and she felt great pressure to continue because she was viewed as a competent specialist. She feared authority and did not want to face the punishment, financial loss and criticism of expressing her distress. Doctors who interfered with the population control plan were condemned as counter revolutionaries.
She was also confused. Throughout her medical training, she had been taught that life began after birth and that anything a doctor did beforehand was not murder - even if the infant’s head was crowning.
Her guilt and grief were compounded by her Christian faith. She found her faith in 1980 while at university, was baptized in 1983 and later sang in the choir at church. None of her fellow believers knew what her job involved. Being a Government-controlled church, she was afraid to reveal her anguish.
She never even told her family what she did. "How could I tell them?" she asks. "They would think I cut meat (like a butcher)."
She lost any desire for marriage or children. "I hated Chinese men who have big power They make suffering for children, for women. Who decides the one-child policy? The Communist Party leaders decide. He never thinks of the woman, how she suffers."
Finally Dr Wong decided to leave her homeland. A door opened when Australia promoted English-language courses for Chinese. She arrived in December 1989 and applied for refugee status in June 1991.
A member of the refugee review tribunal, Dr R. Hudson, found that "persecution of a person who refuses, because of her genuine religious belief to carry out forced abortions on pregnant women, is persecution for a (Refugees) Convention-based reason". (The United nations Refugees Convention of 1951 and the Refugees Protocol of 1967 provide a legal obligation not to a "refugee" under the United Nations definition, that is a person with a "welt founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political option.")
He also said it was "strongly arguable" that compulsory abortion "would fall foul" of the prohibition against cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Before her appeal, Dr Wong had been too ashamed to tell anybody she was a Christian. "I don’t think I’m really Christian. I think I’m opposite to a Christian because I do so many bad things," she says. "I didn’t try and do something for Chinese women. I’m not a very brave woman, I’m weak."
Now she feels the only way she can atone for her deeds is to try to help other Chinese women by making known what happens in the name of population control in China.
"You have to listen to the woman, to the story. Listen case by case. You can’t say, ‘everybody go back’. Let her speak. She is not stupid. Listen to her story, then you can understand what is going on in China."