Thursday, September 22, 2005
This Just Sickens Me
We've all probabaly heard horror stories about individual families in China and what they do to try an comply with China's "one-child" policy. But now it seems some of those horrors are unofficially official.
FAMILY planning officials who forced women to have abortions and couples to be sterilised were reported yesterday to have been sacked or detained for abuse of China's "one child" policy - but legal experts doubt that they will ever be punished.We have got to get the gospel in there in a big way!
The officials had been trying to reduce the high birth rate in the city of Linyi, in Shandong province, but their approach was investigated after a number of people complained to the authorities."Some persons concerned in a few counties and townships of Linyi did commit practices that violated the law," Yu Xuejun, spokesman for the National Population and Family Planning Commission, said. "The responsible persons have been removed from their posts. Some of them are being investigated for liabilities and some have been detained."
He did not say how many officials were involved.
Some women said that their relatives had been detained to put pressure on them to agree to a late-term abortion. Parents with two children were ordered to submit to sterilisation. Several families decided to seek legal redress. However, in a sign of the nervousness among local authorities about the challenge to the state, Chen Guangcheng, a blind rural activist leading the class-action lawsuit, was seized from a Beijing street and placed under house arrest.
