Co-authored with Jeremy Kryn
WASHINGTON, D.C., September 27, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – “Family Planning Official dragged my wife into a dark room and beat her brutally. She gripped their legs and knelt down to beg, ‘I know I’m wrong. Please forgive me. Please forgive me…”
This chilling account of the savage beating of a woman in China is pulled from a groundbreaking new report released last week by Women’s Rights Without Frontiers. The report recounts in excruciating detail thirteen new, documented cases of the brutal coercion that women and their families routinely experience under the country’s one-child policy.
Family planning officials forced the family of Lixiang Luo and her husband, Muyuan Zou, to smash their house after they were suspected of having a second child.
The report was leaked out of China by a source who requested anonymity for fear of the reprisals that other critics of the one-child policy have been subjected to. It was unveiled at a U.S. Congressional Hearing on the one-child policy, held September 22.
The excerpt at the beginning of this article was taken from Case 2 of the new report. It describes the story of a couple that was late for a pregnancy check-up, by one day. The story is told by the husband, Xiangan Zhao, who says that because of the beating he received, he is now partially disabled.
“They beat and kicked like storms,” Zhao recounts. “When I tried to stand up and run away by instinct, [the family planning official] commanded again, ‘Beat him with rubber sticks.’ I was stricken down again and could not move this time. They dragged my arms and threw me in a dark room.”
“I’d like to ask: where is the justice?” Zhao concludes. “Where is the law?”
But the story, as disturbing as it is, is only one amongst thousands of such stories that happen every year in the communist country, to which Western countries often turn a blind eye, and is by no means the most extreme.
The report tells heart-rending stories of forced abortions - including on one woman who was eight months pregnant and on another who carrying twins at 8 ½ months - forced sterilizations, forced contraception, the demolition of homes, and the use detention, horrendous torture and the fining of relatives of “violators.”
“October 11, 2006 was the day of crushing despair for Shenyue Zhang’s family. Because it was on this day that Shenyue Zhang was beaten to death by the Family Planning Officials,” reads the introduction of Case 12.
The cause of the fatal beating was that Zhang’s son was suspected of having violated the one-child policy. Zhang was seized by family planning officials on the morning of October 10, 2006, and on October 11 an official went to his family to tell them that he was dead. His body had already been shipped off by the officials, and his family was never able to recover it.
Xin was beaten so severely by family planning officials that he is now permanently and severely disabled.
Case Seven tells the story of a couple who gave birth to a second child in Henan Province. On March 7, 2008, family planning police arrived at the couple’s house in the evening, demanding that they pay the fine for having a second child. After the father, Xin, asked the officials for their credentials, he and his brother, Xiandong Luo, were brutally beaten.
“The man beating Xiandong Luo turned round and hit Xin’s temple with a glass bottle,” reads the account. “Xin was stunned immediately and fell down on the ground. Blood streamed across his body. Xin’s mother (over seventy years old) laid down and held him with her arms, but they kicked her abdomen.”
The beating delivered by the family planning officials was so severe that Xin is now permanently and severely disabled.
“In China, a woman’s body is not her own. It belongs to the state,” said Women’s Rights Without Frontiers President Reggie Littlejohn. “For the Chinese Communist Party to act as ‘womb police’ and crush the life inside her is a heinous crime against humanity.”
In her testimony before the Sept. 22 hearing, Littlejohn also raised the case of blind activist, Chen Guangcheng, who was arrested in 2006 for helping to expose the Chinese government’s use of forced sterilization and abortions to enforce its one-child policy.” He has since been jailed, tortured and denied medical treatment. He is now languishing under house arrest, in poor health and cut off from the world. (A short video on Chen and a petition to free him are posted here.)
“We have chosen to release the names of the perpetrators of these Crimes Against Humanity, so that they can be held accountable before the world,” Littlejohn said of the materials she provided Congress. “This report contains dozens of their names, as well as details of their crimes.”
To sign the Women’s Rights Without Frontiers petition against forced abortion, click here.
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