The Chinese government recently granted a settlement of $11,200 dollars to Feng Jianmei and her husband Deng Jiyuan after local government officials forcibly aborted Feng when she was seven months pregnant. Feng and Deng have one child, so when Feng got pregnant with a second child local family planning officials fined them 40,000 Yuan ($6,300) which they could not afford to pay. In May, local government officials, seized and blindfolded Feng and forced her to sign a paper "consenting" to the abortion, then they forcibly aborted her child by jamming a needle into its head while five men held Feng down.
Forced abortion under China's one child policy is not rare, but this case received widespread international attention after Feng's husband posted a pictures of Feng lying next to the dead baby (a lot of times after doing a forced abortion, Chinese family planning officials put the baby's body on the hospital bed next to the woman and leave it up to the woman and her family to pay for the child's burial) on Sina Weibo (China's version of twitter).
In addition to giving the settlement to Feng and Deng, the Chinese government has fired two local officials who were behind Feng's forced abortion and given minor punishments to five more officials. Disturbingly the Chinese government appears to be taking new steps to censor websites and Feng and Deng have reported that they have been harassed by supporters of the Communist party family planning officials (some of whom held banners outside of Feng's hospital room calling her a traitor) after they tried to bring attention to the violation of their rights via Feng's forced abortion.
Update (20 July 2012): on a related note, the story of Feng Jianmei has lead another forced abortion victim, Zhang Wen Fang, to come forth with her story. Zhang was 9 months pregnant in 2008 when eleven family planning officials abducted her, took her to a hospital and injected her with drugs that caused her to go into labor and pass out. When she awoke she asked the doctors about her baby but they refused to say whether it was alive or dead and she also found out that the hospital had removed her uterus, her cervix, her fallopian tubes and her right ovary. After all this, Zhang now has kidney damage and is confined to a wheel-chair, which has caused her to lose her business. After being beating by officials from the Family Planning Commission Zhang's husband left her.
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