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LINYUAN CITY, Hunan Province, China, August 6, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – After Chinese family planning officials forced Gong Qifeng to abort when she was seven months pregnant, the woman developed severe mental illness – a condition she has blamed squarely on the nation's brutal one-child policy in a new lawsuit.

Since the abortion of her second child in November 2011, Gong developed a strong feeling that people were out to harm her, symptoms that are aggravated by seeing a government official.

Chinese media report that doctors in Shaoyang diagnosed her as schizophrenic in June, although she claims to have no history of mental illness.

Her husband, Wu Yongyuan, said family planning officials took his wife to Lianyuan Hospital, saying he had waited too long to pay them a fine that would have allowed the couple to keep their child.

According to the hospital's deputy director of obstetrics, Wu Yongqin, a family planning official named Xiao Xiaochao signed Gong's name to a consent form next to his own. The head nurse in obstetrics agreed Gong had been forcibly taken to the hospital.

Another official said three family planning officials escorted her to the hospital.

After injecting her child with a solution, induced labor to expel the already-dead baby took 30 hours.

Gong was not allowed to touch the baby, who was rushed out of the room and buried in a nearby hill.

The family, which hails from Anping Town, is suing the government for damages.

If her mental illnesses were caused by the state's population control measures, she is far from alone. China boasts of having prevented more than 400 million births since instituting the one-child policy in 1979.

Statistics released in March showed that Chinese doctors had performed 336 million abortions, 196 million sterilizations, and 403 million insertions of intrauterine devices (IUDs), most of them compulsory.

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In 2009, 500 Chinese women committed suicide a year, giving the nation the third highest female suicide rate in the world. Men, however, did not have a comparable suicide rate, leading experts to question whether Beijing's population reduction regime caused the imbalance.

Numerous studies have shown a link between abortion and mental illness when it is chosen by a woman of her “free will,” although many abortions in the United States are believed to be coerced. A metastudy released in July by the University of Siena that analyzed 30 previous studies found that women who had abortions were far more likely to develop mental illnesses later in life.

Last year a study, “The Impact of Prior Abortion on Anxiety and Depression Symptoms During a Subsequent Pregnancy: Data From a Population-Based Cohort Study in China” published n the Bulletin of Clinical Psychopharmacology, found that Chinese women who had abortions were 49 percent more likely to experience depression during a later pregnancy.

Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women's Rights Without Frontiers, filed a “Complaint Concerning Coercive Population Control” with the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (UNCSW) on August 1.