NANNING, CHINA, December 23, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Earlier this year Chinese family planning officials announced that some couples would be allowed to apply to have a second child under the country’s One Child Policy in some circumstances, including if both husband and wife lived with the wife’s family, and the wife’s family had daughters but not sons.
At least one couple – whose name has been given by local media only as Luo – jumped at the opportunity, applying in June with their local family planning office in Nanning to have another baby. Their request was approved, and Mrs. Luo soon became pregnant.
But their dream of a sibling for their oldest child became a nightmare when the family planning police reportedly notified them that the approval had been a mistake and was being rescinded. The Luos were presented with a horrifying choice: Abort their wanted baby, or pay punishing fines for the rest of their lives.
According to Want China Times, family planning officials admitted the fault for the error was their own. The law had recently been updated to clarify that only wives who came from families with only two daughters were eligible for the exception to the one-child policy, but Mrs. Luo has more than one sister. When local officials initially considered her application, they used the old guidelines, which did not specify a number for eligibility – they only said that the wife had to come from a family of all female offspring. When they realized their mistake, they revoked their approval immediately, but it was too late – Mrs. Luo had already conceived.
Mr. Luo told Want China Times that he plans to take legal action if family planning officials do not offer “a satisfactory solution.”
The implementation of China’s one-child policy is notoriously brutal – with women routinely forced to undergo abortions and sterilizations, or handed crippling fines and other punishments for “illegal pregnancies.” Human rights activists say as many as 35,000 abortions are performed in China each day, nearly ten times the rate of the United States.
Despite that, United States Vice President Joe Biden glossed over all that during a 2011 visit to Beijing, telling Chinese officials, “Your policy has been one which I fully understand – I’m not second-guessing – of one child per family.”
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