By now, you may well have seen, or heard about, the photograph that has shocked the world. In the image – which we have chosen not to reproduce here – a young woman lies dazed on a hospital bed, next to her recently aborted foetus.
The woman is Feng Jiamei, from the Shaanxi province of China. She was forced to undergo the procedure in the seventh month of pregnancy, because she could not afford to pay the hefty fine incurred by having a second baby under the country’s strict one child policy.
Feng’s husband Deng Jiyuan told the Global Times that five men forcibly delivered a poisonous injection to his wife, after making her sign an agreement to having the abortion. He said that she was traumatised, which perhaps goes without saying. The brutality is difficult to fathom, not least given that a baby born at seven months has a strong chance of survival.
While local officials in Zhenping county, where the incident took place, denied that Feng was coerced into having the abortion, a preliminary investigation by the Shaanxi Provincial Population and Family Planning Commission confirmed that it had been forced.
The one child policy was introduced in 1979 to slow the birth rate. Under the rule, married, urban couples must have only one child. There are exemptions for rural couples, ethnic minorities, and parents with no siblings, but they are rare.
The Shaanxi Provincial Council expressed shock at the incident, and promised to investigate and bring the perpertrators to justice. However, US-based charity All Girls Allowed notes that forced abortion, often referred to by the euphemistic term of “remedial measures” (bujiju cuoshi) is explicitly endorsed in the regulations of 18 of China’s 31 provincial jurisdictions.
Due to the one child policy, China’s rates of abortion are sky-high: on average, 8 million women have one each year. There are 300,000 officials whose job is to enforce the one child policy, backed up by a network of 92 million members who assist with enforcement and informing. The methods used vary between provinces, but include random pregnancy tests on married women, and unspecified “follow up” services, which can include abortion or sterilisation. All Girls Allowed reports that the vaginas of rural woman are routinely checked for recent births, while officials are often given a financial incentive structure to meet abortion and sterilisation quotas. It is easy to see how this policy leads to coercion.
All of these details are quite shocking in their cruelty and invasiveness. Under these policies, a woman’s body is treated as public property, an object rife for inspection. Perhaps it is little wonder that China is the only country in the world where women are more likely to commit suicide than men. The Beijing Suicide Research and Prevention Centre reported in 2009 that the suicide rate for women was three times higher than for men, and around 500 women in China kill themselves each day.
Underpinning the whole feminist argument in favour of abortion rights is the notion of choice: a woman’s right to choose what happens to her body, and to choose whether she gives birth to a child. This incident acts as a powerful reminder that abortion itself can be used as a tool for oppression, violently undermining a woman’s control over her own body.
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