Suffering unlimited
Recently, Xinran, the Chinese-English journalist and author of Messages from an Unknown Chinese Mother: the lives of women in contemporary China, visited Australia to talk about her new book. It is a collection of real life stories told by Chinese women forced to abandon their babies for social, political and historical reasons. You can hear an affecting interview with her here on ABC’s The World Today in a piece titled ‘Hidden Brutality of China’s one-child policy’.
Xinran’s documenting and speaking about the true life suffering of uncountable numbers of Chinese women brought to mind the real life sufferings of two Chinese women whose experiences were seared into my mind in the 1990s. I don’t want what happened to them to be forgotten or overlooked.
In 1995 a lawyer friend introduced a Chinese woman to me. She had failed in her original attempt to get asylum in Australia and was appealing. My friend, who worked for the Refugee Advice and Casework Service in Melbourne, was trying to stop her deportation.
I called her ‘Dr Wong’ in the pieces I went on to write about her, including in The Age (‘China’s children of the damned’, March 31, 1995) and here.
Dr Wong was a Chinese gynaecologist forced to carry out abortions almost up to birth, against her will, at a hospital in Jiangsu province.
She told me about how heavily pregnant women were brought to her kicking and screaming. They were tied by their hands and feet to the table for the abortion. Dr Wong estimated she performed at least 10,000 abortions in her seven years at the hospital. She was forced to kill almost full-term babies in the womb by lethal injection and put babies who survived abortion into rubbish bins to die. She showed me photos. I still have them. They are unbearable to look at. Fully formed babies in kidney dishes, covered with blood.
Dr Wong won her appeal on religious freedom grounds. A Christian, my friend successfully argued that being forced to perform abortions was a violation of her religious freedom. She was granted asylum.
On February 6, 1995, Dr Wong testified before a Senate Legal and Constitutional Legislation Committee (fearing reprisal, she would not use her real name and the hearing was closed). Part of her testimony appears here:
In the hospital, you can see the women suffer and have pain for this one-child policy. It is only for this one-child policy that they came to the hospital; like they are coming to jail. They kill her baby, and they make her suffer. They make your heart break. This happens every day in China – every day. You can see the bodies of the babies – like a mountain of rubbish. Every day you see babies who want to try to get breath and who want to live. They did not die at first. They want to live. You saw miles of blood go out, and the mother crying. Every day mothers saw dead babies. The mothers catch the bare babies and cry.
We stayed in touch for a few years. While settled in Melbourne, she was not at peace. She was tormented by what she had done and hated herself. Despite her faith, she could not find forgiveness. She said to me:
Every year at Christmas time we have a show for the birth of Jesus. When I saw the baby (who was playing the part of) Jesus, I think: “I kill this baby”…I don’t think I’m really Christian. I think I’m opposite to a Christian because I do so many bad things. I didn’t try and do something for Chinese women. I’m not a very brave woman, I’m weak. In my heart I know Christian always brave, the Christian dies for God, for human rights, for life, for the right things. These things I cannot do, so I am not a Christian. I am evil. I think if I say I am a Christian, no one believe me.
The last time I saw her she was contemplating plastic surgery to change her face. She could not look at herself in the mirror.
Only four years after this, Australia witnessed the shocking case of Zhu Quing Ping, deported from Australia after begging to be allowed to stay to deliver her “unauthorised” baby, due in 10 days.
“We have no obligation”, said then Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock about Zhu Quing Ping, on 60 Minutes, June 6, 1999 (though it was the then acting Immigration Minister, Amanda Vanstone, now Australia’s ambassador to Italy, who authorised the deportation).
Zhu Quing Ping had arrived by boat in 1994 and sought asylum. During three years detention at the Port Hedland detention centre in WA, she gave birth to a daughter. Requests to be allowed to marry the child’s father were refused. Ms Zhu conceived a second baby in November 1996. All avenues of appeal were exhausted. The pregnancy was dismissed by a departmental official as irrelevant in a claim for refugee status. The department took advice that the risk of abortion was “low”.
Ms Zhu pleaded not to be returned, at least not until her baby was safely delivered:
her only request was to go home with a live baby. “The manager said I couldn’t. He said you must go back to China, all the procedures have been arranged. [He said] You won’t be persecuted when you return to China,” she said in a video interview.
The manager was wrong. Ms Zhu’s baby was returned to a State-sanctioned death sentence.
Seven days after deportation she was subjected to an injection through her abdomen to destroy the baby’s nervous system. Labour was induced, and the baby delivered. Some reports said the baby had been born alive and was strangled.
A video interview, the written order by family planning authorities to security officers to apprehend the woman on arrival, a medical certificate (“On July 21, 1997 the second pregnancy eight months plus has been induced to be terminated in our hospital”) and the bill for the abortion were smuggled out of China and exposed at a Senate committee hearing by (then) Senator Brian Harradine. I have this material.
A 60 Minutes team tracked Ms Zhu down and compiled a harrowing piece about her experience (aired June 6, 1999). She wept inconsolably as she spoke of the death of her almost-born son.
They forced me into a car and took me to the hospital. I told the doctors I am already more than eight months pregnant. I was begging them to wait for my husband to come and help me but they said no and they gave me the injection anyway and I went into labour. After the baby was born I couldn’t get out of bed. I asked the nurse what sex the baby was and she said he was a boy. A baby boy. The boy weighed three and a half kilos. When I heard this I just burst out crying and I cried so hard I actually passed out.
Concerned for her wellbeing, the journalists took her to the Australian consulate in Guangzhou, seeking protection for her and her three-year- old daughter Joycie. Efforts by refugee advocates and Senator Brian Harradine to secure Ms Zhu a visa by which she could leave China and by which Australia could make amends, failed. Attempts to bring her here to give evidence to two inquiries failed. So fearful was she of being forced to leave the consulate’s protection, she tried to harm herself, according to Australian Susan Murphy, who cared for her for almost two weeks.
It emerged that other pregnant Chinese women had been deported as well and were mostly likely aborted on arrival.
China perpetuates violence against women through the most barbaric fertility control plan in the world. Its policy has resulted in forced sterilisation, forced abortion, forced fitting of IUDs, female foeticide and infanticide and prenatal sex selection. A Chinese woman’s right to bodily integrity and her freedom of conscience are forfeited daily.
The Nuremberg Trials defined forcing a pregnant woman to submit to the killing of her unborn child as a crime against humanity.
The outcry has to be louder.
August 13th, 2010 at 9:07 am
This was to awful to read. Heart breaking.
August 13th, 2010 at 9:10 am
Is this what they mean when they talk about sustaining a population?
August 13th, 2010 at 9:33 am
Ohhh the pain.
I hope Minister Philip Ruddock and Amanda Vanstone read this, they are also morally responsible.
I just hate that the bigger organisations/corporations become less moral.
Their ability to chose between right and wrong has only a basis in a budget or ever increasing financial returns, this is at the cost to humanity.
August 13th, 2010 at 1:10 pm
Absolutely disgusting. I don’t think my mind can even comprehend the grief. I lost one of my children when I was nearly 7 months pregnant and that was horrible enough… I just cannot fathom what these women must go through being forced to submit to this abuse.
I cannot believe that immigration would send these women back to China, knowing full well what would happen and claim no responsibility or obligation to protect these women and their children. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised given here in Australia we have legalised late term abortions. These women in China are being tortured and having their children murdered, these women kicking and screaming to save the lives of their babies and yet women here in Australia would freely submit to the same thing… under vastly different circumstances.
I am angry and heart broken for these women and I feel so helpless. As one, insignificant person, what can I do to help these women and children? Nothing, other than express my outrage. I don’t have the power to save even one mother or one baby from this horrible crime against nature. As a mother and a human being, that kills me.
August 13th, 2010 at 1:16 pm
“As one, insignificant person, what can I do to help these women and children?”
Well… we have an election coming up… Take these stories to your local member and tell them you will not vote for them if they will not stand against it. Use your vote to speak out for asylum seekers and for a government (or at least members of parliament) who will use their power to fight against these atrocities happening in our name and on our watch.
Melinda, what else can we do? I will add my voice to the outcry if you just tell us where.
August 13th, 2010 at 8:43 pm
This is exactly what Labor intends when they talk about their population control policy! Please think about this when you vote in the australian election on 21st of August.
August 14th, 2010 at 4:30 am
Do any of you really think an out cry will make at difference? We have become a barbaric people…women in the United States do this “by choice” after 6 months gestation. They call it “their rights to their bodies”.
We need to clean up our own back yard before we get insensed and outraged our China’s.
August 14th, 2010 at 9:54 am
“@Kasey: We need to clean up our own back yard before we get insensed and outraged our China’s.”
I disagree Kasey, for two reasons.
First, it’s a human rights abuse, not an issue of ‘choice’. But even if we were to put it as such, pro-choice rhetoric is firmly on the side of the Chinese women on this one. Any person who believes that women have “their rights to their bodies” should be as shocked and outraged at a government that forces abortions, as they would be at a government which denies or restricts access to them. We can be opposed to this no matter what we think of elective abortion.
Second, this is an issue which strikes at the heart of pro-choice. While the issue of woman’s choice is vastly and shockingly different, the process by which these Chinese babies are dying is in many cases the same in which babies die during elective late term abortions. Yet I doubt that, on reading this article, the immediate shock is that the women have been robbed of their choice – no, it’s the imagery of tiny babies, covered in blood, thrown in a bin; of mothers holding a dead newborn and weeping; of doctors robbing infants of their first breath. On that level, our stomachs turn as we weep. How can we qualify one as infanticide and not the other? How can we allow one and not the other? How can both instances be state-sanctioned? These are huge and powerful questions which need to be asked of everyone. And good on MTR for doing it!!
August 24th, 2010 at 5:22 pm
Melinda, have you ever read Stephen Mosher’s “A Mother’s Ordeal: One Woman’s Fight Against China’s One Child Policy”? It is a harrowing read, and difficult to find. It details a lot of what you have addressed here. Thank you for addressing a challenging topic.
September 6th, 2010 at 6:52 pm
I have Lisa, it is a powerful and deeply distressing book. I have quoted from it in other articles over the years. Mtr.
September 29th, 2010 at 9:34 pm
Abortion is becoming a blight on the dignity of the human race BUT when a government cannot in one instance,show clemency for a woman, in the final few weeks of pregnancy,that is one step further DOWN the ladder of decency.How would allowing that woman, a chance of life in Australia,have hurt anyone?As it stands,the people who sent her back are morally responsible for the murder of her unborn baby and she will probably never recover from her ordeal.What is that saying about “all it takes for evil to prevail,is for good men to do nothing”
And unfortunately,instances of late terminations are becoming more prevalent in our own back yard.Abortion Cinics are already advertising late term abortions on the internet,yet I thought it was only legal until 24 weeks UNLESS 2 doctors agree.Shouldn’t the agreement happen before the advertising and by independent Doctors?