The kidnapped Chaldean priest was freed.
Word came down from the central government in Beijing that it was time to strengthen enforcement of China‘s one-child policy.
In response, people here said, birth control bureaucrats showed up in a half-dozen towns with sledgehammers and threatened to knock holes in the homes of people who had failed to pay fines imposed for having more than one child. Other family planning officials, backed by hired toughs, pushed their way into businesses owned by parents of more than one child and confiscated everything from sacks of rice to color televisions, they said.
The brutal fine-collection drive was launched last week around Bobai, 110 miles southeast of Nanning in southern China’s Guangxi province. It constituted the latest example of abusive local enforcement of a policy that China’s leadership says is vital to maintaining swift economic growth and spreading its benefits more evenly among a population already at 1.3 billion people.
Local officials eager to meet population quotas have frequently been accused of forcing women to submit to abortions or sterilizations to keep the birthrate down. But the problem in the Bobai area was that lax enforcement of the policy over the years led to a high number of families with several children — and suddenly the local family planning bureau wanted to collect its fines or else.
"The people who didn’t have money, they threatened to knock their houses down, or punch holes in the roof," a resident said.
But the farmers of Bobai and nearby towns have been known since the Qing Dynasty for resistance to highhanded rulers. True to their legacy, they rose up against the collection teams, whom they decried as bandits. Backed by their sons, thousands of peasants and townspeople encircled government and birth control centers across surrounding Bobai County, residents here said, stoning riot police brought in to quell the unrest and, in some places, trashing local offices.
"There was trouble in all the villages around here," said a truck driver who, like most of those interviewed, spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retribution by local officials.
Even near the main county office building, a witness said, a white banner was unfurled calling for revenge against Su Jianzhong, the Bobai County Communist Party secretary. "Crack down on the head of the bandits, Su Jianzhong," it advertised for all to see, until authorities pulled it down.
The townspeople were all the more unwilling to accept authorities’ demands for payment because, as frequently is the case in China, they expressed belief that local officials were generally corrupt and that the money for fines would go to line their pockets rather than into government coffers.
Mollie at Get Religion examines two recent abortion-related stories. The first appeared in the WaPo magazine on Sunday, followed by an online chat on Monday with the author. It’s heart-breaking and soul-chilling, focusing on the practice of "selective reduction" – you know, aborting one baby when there are just too many in there. Although, as one person in the piece claims, it’s not really abortion because the remains of the fetus are still in the uterus. Mollie notes that the piece is striking because the writer does not shrink from describing what happens – scenes which involve the pregnant women watching the procedure while it is happening, via ultrasound. It will send you to your knees in a nanosecond.
(excerpt after the jump)
And, sure enough, on [sonographer Rachel] Greenbaum’s screen were three little honeycombed chambers with three fetuses growing in them. The fetuses were moving and waving their limbs; even at this point, approaching 12 weeks of gestation, they were clearly human, at that big-headed-could-be-an-alien-but-definitely-not-a-kitten stage of development. Evans has found this to be the best window of time in which to perform a reduction. Waiting that long provides time to see whether the pregnancy might reduce itself naturally through miscarriage, and lets the fetuses develop to the point where genetic testing can be done to see which are chromosomally normal. . . .
So far, there was nothing anomalous about any of the fetuses. Greenbaum turned the screen toward the patient. “That’s the little heartbeat,” she said, pointing to the area where a tiny organ was clearly pulsing. “And there are the little hands. There’s the head. The body.”
“Oh, my God, I can really see it!” the patient cried. “Oh, my God! I can see the fingers!”
“Okay!” she said, abruptly, gesturing for the screen to be turned away. She began sobbing. There were no tissues in the room, so her husband gave her a paper towel, which she crumpled to her face. The patient spent the rest of the procedure with her hospital gown over her face, so she would not see any more of what was happening.
snip
Still, she (a sonogram technician) says: “It’s a very hard procedure, because the baby is moving, and you are chasing it. That is what is very emotional — when the baby is moving and you are chasing it.
God have mercy on these little ones. For the most part, brought into existence by reproductive technologies, and then chased to their deaths by needle-wielding monsters.
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