Chinese Confirm forced Abortion
LYNNE O’DONNELL China correspondent
A WOMAN, deported from Australia and then forced to have an abortion, was admitted to a hospital in southern China for the operation in July 1997, staff members confirmed yesterday.
Only days after Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock ordered an investigation into the affair that was first raised by Independent senator Brian Harradine, The Weekend Australian has found that Zhu Qingping, entered the Beihai City People’s Hospital on July 21, 1997, when she was more than eight months pregnant with her second child, according to hospital documents.
She was 28 years old. The documents confirm that Ms Zhu’s child was aborted by inducing labour. The procedure cost 805.22 yuan ($147).
Staff at the hospital said it was not clear whether Ms Zhu was willing to have the termination. But standard practice is to gain written permission from the patient, or relatives, before the operation, a nurse in the hospital’s gynaecology department said.
The operation, "yinchan" in Chinese, entailed administering drugs to induce labour.
The drugs destroy the baby’s nervous system, making survival impossible whether the child is born dead or alive.
Senator Harradine contended that Ms Zhu had been assured before her deportation that she would not be forced to abort her child.
Australian officials in Beijing said yesterday they had not been asked to participate in the investigation. But they said it was unlikely that her life was in danger, as the senator’s office claimed.
Beihai, 2200km from Beijing, is a port city on the far southern coast of Guangxi province, one of China’s poorest regions.
While the use of forced abortions in administering China’s one-child-per-family policy has been well documented over the past 20 years, officials strongly oppose coercion.
"There have been many egregious cases in the enforcement of the policy but the intention is not to undertake these coercive practices. These are the actions of local officials, who are driven by numbers," said a Western charity worker who specializes in reproductive health.
She said the case of Ms Zhu was "hardly reflective of the entire program". The one-child policy was introduced in the late 1970s to check the growth of China’s population, which is now close to 1.3 billion. The policy is strictly administered in urban areas, where families face heavy fines if they have a second child. In some rural areas, the policy allows families to have a second child if the first is a girl. Non-Chinese minority groups, such as Tibetans, are usually allowed two or more children.
"In the early stages of the policy, some heavy-handed methods had to be employed, especially in the rural areas, where people think they need to have many children to help in the fields and to look after them in their old age," said a Chinese family planner.
Policy implementation is above 95 per cent in urban areas, the aid worker said.
Areas on China’s east coast, with higher economic development and education levels, had also embraced the notion of smaller families, she said.