An illegal pregnancy and a legal abortion
One woman’s story of the forced termination of her eight-month foetus highlights the trauma faced by many of those who
Luo Yanquan and Xiao Aiying do not know how their story got posted on the internet. They were too distraught and shocked to have even considered reaching out to the media as an option.
There is the possibility that someone in the government, aware of their situation and sympathetic, quietly released information about them on a popular Chinese website which works in the same way Twitter does.
Their story is macabre. Family planning officials decided Xiao, eight months into her pregnancy, had violated China’s one-child policy and forced her to have an abortion.
The couple already have a daughter, and this second pregnancy was accidental, but when it was confirmed three months in, husband and wife both felt it was too late to have an abortion and assumed the most that could happen to them was a heavy fine.
Instead, Xiao was dragged kicking and screaming out of her own home by authorities.
What we have posted here is eight minutes of the interview we had with her husband, Luo, recounting the events:
While there was not enough time to broadcast this interview on the channel, we felt his words so compelling that they merited being heard in full and have made this a web exclusive.
When we met Xiao she was in the hospital. They had given her womb an injection, and she was waiting for the operation in which doctors would remove the dead foetus. Our report as it aired on the channel, is below: