Beijing, China — A Chinese province that has carried out forced abortions under the draconian one-child policy has raised fines for second children to eight times an offending couple's annual income.
Rising incomes in Guangdong, one of the country's richest provinces, have allowed more couples to have unauthorized pregnancies and legitimatize the births by paying a fine to register the child. Reforms that will take effect in September give officials new powers in the fight against pregnancy.
The penalty for couples who have a second child without permission will rise from twice combined income to eight times, while poor residents with extra children will be subject to an annual social levy.
Attempts to limit family size in Guangdong have been embroiled in controversy in recent years. Visitors to the province report families of four or more are common away from the big cities.
Villagers say family planning officials operate by terror in many counties, forcing women to have abortions and imposing penalties on families, most commonly demolishing their homes.
President Bush last week withdrew $34 million of funding for the United Nations Population Fund partly in response to reports that forced abortions were common in Sihui county in Guangdong. China and the UN rejected charges that Population Fund officials directly colluded in forced abortions.
But the claim was backed by a State Department fact-finding team that visited Sihui in May, and Secretary of State Colin Powell said that China's use of fines to force women to terminate pregnancies was also a key factor in the decision.
Beijing rejects accusations that coercion and the use of quotas are widespread, pointing to UN estimates that less than three percent of women of childbearing age undergo abortions, roughly the same as in the U.S.
However, brutality and corruption plague attempts to portray a system becoming more humane over time. In the worst cases, saline solution is injected into the womb to induce a stillborn child as late as eight-and-a-half months into the pregnancy.
The Communist authorities are proud that 330 million births have been prevented since the early 1980s.
The Chinese Family Planning Agency is attempting to transform its role into a modern provider of advice and information but it still remains responsible for administering an uncompromising drive to limit the population to 1.6 billion by 2050.
China Orders Taiwanese Women to Have Forced Abortions, Sterilizations
Taipei, Taiwan — Chinese women married to Taiwanese men are being ordered to have abortions or sterilization surgery during visits to the mainland to comply with China's controversial “one-child policy.”
At least six of those women report that family planning officials forced them to undergo pregnancy tests in recent months, according to the Taiwanese body that deals with mainland relations, the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF).
SEF legal services director Patricia Lin said by phone from Taipei Friday that those who were deemed to have violated the “one-child” rule – by getting pregnant after already having a child – were also fined and threatened with further action if they had more children.
At least one woman paid the stipulated fine of 2,500 yuan ($302), Lin said. Children's identification cards were confiscated, too.
The women said they were told either to have abortions or, in the case of those who already had two children, to have surgery to have their fallopian tubes cut, tied or sealed to prevent further pregnancies.
Even in cases where a woman was pregnant for the first time, family planning officials had instructed her to have an abortion on the grounds she had not applied for government permission to give birth –reportedly a stipulation on the mainland.
Lin said she could not say whether any of the six actually had an abortion. “The victims only described what the Chinese officials told them to do, but we don't know for a fact if anyone was truly forced to have an abortion because they keep it private,”Lin said.
What was happening was “totally wrong,” she said. The SEF has now written to its mainland equivalent, the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait, to urge an end to the practice.
The letter had drawn the mainland body's attention to the fact that the children of Chinese women married to Taiwanese husbands were eligible for Taiwanese permanent residence registration, “so they won't infringe the one-child policy.”
“The Chinese government [already] knows this,” Lin said, adding that she thought the problems might be happening mainly in rural areas where family planning officials were unaware of the situation.
While it was not clear whether the “one-child policy” was being enforced more rigorously, prior to the latest six cases fewer similar incidents were reported. Lin said the SEF had recorded two in 2000, one in 1999 and two in 1995.
The foundation has warned other Taiwan-based Chinese brides to prepare for harassment if they plan to visit the mainland. Lin said an estimated 100,000 Taiwanese were married to spouses from the mainland, and most lived in Taiwan.
The letter to the mainland association stated that cases like this could be detrimental to cross-straits relations.
The SEF exists as a semi state-funded organization authorized by the Taiwanese government to handle relations with the mainland, in the light of the government's policy of having no formal relations with Beijing.
Its mainland counterpart has a similar function, as Beijing also shuns official contact with Taipei. Communist China considers the capitalist island nation a renegade province and has threatened to use force if necessary to block any moves toward further independence.
The reports from Taiwan come at a time the Bush administration is said to be considering revoking federal funding for a U.N. agency involved in Chinese population programs.
After pro-life groups charged that U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) programs in China were tolerating coercive aspects of the “one-child policy,” the administration last January froze $34 million earmarked for the UNFPA for the current year.
The State Department in May sent a three-person team to China to investigate the claims. It returned and submitted its report, which has yet to be released. Pro-abortion members of Congress said this week the White House may be withholding the report because — they suspect — it had found no substance to the pro-lifers' allegations.
Earlier, the Population Research Institute – which spearheaded a campaign calling on Washington to “zero-fund” the UNFPA – expressed skepticism that the State Department delegation would be able to make an accurate assessment of the situation on the ground in China.
Any team sent with Beijing's permission and which planned to operate openly in the country would not have “a snowball's chance in hell of finding accurate information,” PRI president Steve Mosher said at the time the trip was announced.
The PRI itself sent undercover investigators to China last September. It said those investigators had taken more than two dozen witness statements testifying to “rampant and unrelenting” abuses in the UNFPA's China program.
The U.N. program itself has denied that it supports coercion in China, saying its work there aims to reduce unwanted pregnancies and abortions.
Marriages between Taiwanese and Chinese have been on the rise, as more people from Taiwan – which China sees as a renegade province – visited the mainland in the 1990s. About 150,000 Chinese are believed to have married Taiwanese, but Taiwan only allows about 3,600 a year of them to settle on the island.
However, Taiwan is now allowing pregnant Chinese women married to Taiwanese men to lengthen their temporary permits and stay until after their children are born – to avoid coerced abortions in China.
(These articles courtesy of Steven Ertelt and the Pro-Life Infonet email newsletter. For more information or to subscribe go to www.prolifeinfo.org or email infonet@prolifeinfo.org.)
