lucky tot: An infant at a post-natal care unit in Beijing. (Reuters)

Beijing, Oct. 23: A spate of government-sanctioned but illegal abortions of women carrying their second child has been taking place across some provinces in China.

More than 120,000 people in eastern Shandong province alone have been forced to undergo abortions and sterilisations over the past few months, said Chen Guangcheng, 34, a blind social activist from Linyi town in eastern Shandong where some of the worst cases occurred.

Some women were in their last month of pregnancy, and died during the process.

“It is a crazy and merciless situation,” said Chen. “Recently no one was really enforcing the one-child policy. But as the population in Shandong has ballooned. I think the provincial government put pressure on local family planning departments who’ve just gone nuts.”

Days after making this comment in Beijing, Chen was ambushed on the street by plainclothes security officers from Shandong who bundled him into a car and took him back to Linyi. There, Chen found himself under de facto house arrest, where he remains even though no charges have been filed against him.

Though China’s National Population and Family Planning Commission has said this figure is exaggerated, in a rare admission the commission’s spokesperson, Yu Xuejun, admitted that “some persons concerned in a few counties and townships of Linyi did commit practices that violated the law.”

Zhu Hong Ying and her husband, Xia Jian Dong, who are farmers in Zhai Tian Zhuang village near Linyi, and who already have one son, said they first heard of the forced abortions in March, when Zhu was five months pregnant.

“We panicked and ran into (Linyi) to hide,” Zhu said in an interview that had to be conducted on the telephone as local police had sealed off her area in the wake of Chen’s detention. “But to get to us, about a month after we left they arrested three of my sisters-in-law. So we felt very guilty and went home.”

Zhu said what happened next went beyond her deepest fears.

Officials from the local family planning department took her to a clinic where a doctor injected her in the stomach. A day later Zhu said she delivered a still-born baby boy. Gazing at the corpse was “the most heartbreaking moment of my life”, she said.

But there was no time to dwell on emotions.

Xia said a nurse came into the room and dumped the dead baby in a black plastic bag and asked him to throw it into the back of a truck parked nearby.

“It had a large container kind of thing at the back,” said Xia, his voice quavering over the line. “When I opened the door and looked in it was full of black bags and blood.”

Such reports have been filtering out of various provinces in China for the last few months, said Gao Zhi Zheng, an activist lawyer in Beijing .

“One of my clients is an unmarried woman from (central Henan province) who was aborted at seven months because it seems the authorities took it upon themselves to decide a single woman had no right to have a baby,” Gao said, as he spread pictures his client and her partner had taken of their aborted fetus across his table. “Look at this, is this abortion or murder?”

Despite China ’s tough one-child policy, forced abortions are technically illegal in the country. Only financial and other civil penalties can be levied against parents who have more than one child.