Congratulations, It’s an Abortion
The thing about China is sometimes you have to look for the news of the grim and macabre—but never very hard:
With China’s rising affluence, increasing numbers of infertile couples have been seeking surrogate mothers to bear them babies.
In recent years, officials have largely turned a blind eye to this underground womb-for-rent industry that defies the country’s strict childbirth laws. Now, there are signs the authorities are starting to crack down by forcing some surrogate mothers to abort their fetuses.
In the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, three young surrogate first-time mothers were discovered by authorities hiding in a communal flat.
Soon afterwards, district family planning and security officers broke into the flat, bundled them into a van and drove them to a district hospital where they were manhandled into a maternity ward, the mothers recounted to Reuters.
“I was crying ‘I don’t want to do this’,” said a young woman called Xiao Hong, who was pregnant with four-month-old twins.
“But they still dragged me in and injected my belly with a needle,” the 20-year-old told Reuters of her ordeal which happened in late February.
The woman, who declined to give her full name for fear of reprisals, said the men had forced her thumbprint onto a consent form before carrying out the abortion.
Another of the surrogates, who said she’d come from a village in Sichuan province, recounted how officers made her take pills then surgically removed her three-month-old fetus while she was unconscious. “I was terrified,” the 23-year-old said.
China is a sovereign nation and can obviously do as it wishes. And is aborting fetuses really that much more barbaric than marrying them, as they do in Araby? (Okay, not funny.) But I don’t question just the morality of the policy (though certainly that), but also the morality of the people who carry it out. Who goes home at the end of a day spent kidnapping and premature-infanticiding, cracks open a beer, and lets out a satisfied belch at a job well done? The Nazis, sure, and your various Hutus, Khmer Rouge, Soviets, and the like—but if the phrase “banality of evil” ever had meaning, it is the motto for modern China.
This story is as appalling as any you’re likely to read today (or any day), and I’ll bet you a soda that this is the only place you’re going to read it.
And I had to go looking for it.