Monday, May 04, 2009

China's Forced Abortions Spark Infertility, Surrogacy, Crackdown, More Abortions

From http://lifenews.com/int1172.html

China's Forced Abortions Spark Infertility, Surrogacy, Crackdown, More Abortions

by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
May 1, 2009

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Beijing, China (LifeNews.com) -- The population control campaign put in place by family planning officials in China to enforce its one-child policy has always involved forced abortions. A new report indicates that has sparked infertility and given rise to an underground network of surrogate mothers.

Now, family planning authorities are cracking down on the surrogacy and more forced abortions are occurring as a result.

Infertility has long been a one of the panoply of negative consequences for women resulting from abortions and the incidence of infertility is higher in China. As couples find themselves unable to have children, a new Reuters report indicates they are increasingly relying on surrogate mothers to carry children.

The news service indicates the underground surrogacy network is beginning to crumble as local officials in places like the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou are making them have abortions.

"I was crying 'I don't want to do this'," a young woman named Xiao Hong, who was pregnant with four-month-old twins, told Reuters about her abortion in February. "But they still dragged me in and injected my belly with a needle."

She said the men from the family planning agency forced her to put her thumbprint on a consent form before the abortion to validate their coercive actions.

Another woman indicated she was forced to take pills that put her to sleep and had a surgical abortion done on her while she was unconscious.

The official Guangzhou Daily newspaper indicated local officials said the women were unmarried and had illegal pregnancies and that three women "agreed" to the abortions.

As affluent Chinese couples find themselves unable to have children due to infertility, the black market of hospitals, doctors and agencies for surrogate mothers has increased. Some reports indicate surrogate mothers and the agencies that find them earn more profit than people involved in drug trafficking.

Surrogacy agencies have taken to recruiting girls from poor villages to carry children in a way to provide their families with money. Some girls and their families could earn as much as $15,000 by becoming a surrogate mother, an amount of money that dwarfs the typical income in these rural areas.

The Southern Metropolis Weekly estimates as many as 25,000 surrogate babies have been born in China, with some of them going to parents in the United States.

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