In a country where every family is limited to having only one child, what happens when the family has an unplanned second pregnancy and does nothing about it? It turns out that the government just has to step in and intervene, forcing the issue. In China, where the law of the land is that you may only have one child unless you pay a king’s ransom of a penalty fee (40,000 yuan, which is 6,300 in United States dollars and is more than the average annual salary for someone living there), 23 year old Jianmei Feng had the audacity to get pregnant after already having one child and when she failed to pay the second child fine, found herself imprisoned in a hospital.

In the hospital, Ms. Feng was completely cut off from her husband who went missing shortly after she was forced into the hospital. Despite being seven months into her pregnancy, the hospital forced an abortion, illegal under China law but regularly performed in order for family planning departments to meet quotas on how many children are born. I do not doubt that the government turns a blind eye to these crimes because each official, reporting to another official, wants to make sure that his or her status reports look as good as possible.

In addition to the forced horror that Ms. Feng has had to endure, she faced the anger of many of her neighbors because she committed the unthinkable act of bringing this ethical crime to the attention of the foreign media. There are websites where you can find rather gruesome photos of the procedure that was forced upon Feng.

When people send you emails that are full of lies about what horrors Obamacare will allegedly do to the United States, whether it is a set of lies about Death Panels or how it will supposedly make everything worse and more expensive, do yourself a favor and remind the people that there are enough real travesties of justice being perpetrated like this one for them to come along and spread false ones. We need to focus on righting the real wrongs in the world and not extinguishing imaginary fires that are nothing but an excuse to naysay anything and everything that comes from the pen of President Obama.

8 Comments

  1. That’s definitely a fascinating story, Gordon. I do wonder about the hubris of the mother — did she think she’d never be “found out” even after giving birth to an “illegal” child?

      1. That’s the confounding part, Gordon. She knows where she lives. She knows the rules of her government. She had seven months to find a, non-state enforced, remedy — and yet she acted as if she were a special exception to the law for some reason. What did she think would happen? Nothing? Obviously — and, obviously not!

        1. The remedy is pay more than she most likely makes in a year, which is untenable for most Chinese who scrape by — barely. I’m sure she was aware there would be punishment — but a third trimester abortion?

          1. Right. She thought she was special and above the law and that she could somehow escape with her baby intact and not having to pay the fine. Even I know China hates hubris — and her behavior begged to be made an example of how not to test the will of the state.

        2. P.S. —

          It also seems the time to go the media is BEFORE the state aborts your baby — I’m sure there would have been plenty of people in the world who would have raced to her side to pay her fine so her baby would not be killed. Yet she waited until after the killing to make this a media event? It’s all odd to me.

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