BEIJING, January 10, 2014 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A Chinese woman who began suffering from severe mental illness after undergoing a brutal forced abortion has publicly described her private horror.
Gong Qifeng was seven months pregnant with her second child when she was dragged away by officials to Lianyuan Hospital. She said that she recalls begging for mercy as hospital staff pinned her to a bed and injected drugs into her abdomen to kill her child.
She delivered her dead child after 35 hours of excruciating pain.
“It was the pain of my lifetime, worse than the pain of delivering a child. You cannot describe it,” Gong, 25, said in a recent interview with the Associated Press in Beijing. “And it has become a mental pain. I feel like a walking corpse.”
Gong's husband, Wu Yongyuan, said he was not too worried when he first learned Gong was pregnant for a second time, because some families in his village have two or three children.
However, Wu said that when family planning officials learned of her pregnancy they justified the forced abortion by saying he had waited too long to pay them a fine that would have allowed the couple to keep their child.
According to Chinese media reports, Lianyuan Hospital's deputy director of obstetrics, Wu Yongqin, said 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.
Since the forced abortion in November 2011, Gong developed a strong feeling that people were out to harm her, symptoms that were aggravated by seeing a government official.
Her husband told AP that she changed after the abortion. He said she would unexpectedly burst into tears, pick fights with him, punch at him and their son, and refuse contact with friends.
Last year Gong Qifeng was diagnosed as schizophrenic, although she claims to have no history of mental illness.
When Wu sought compensation from local authorities to pay for his wife's medical treatment for schizophrenia, which he believes was caused by her horrific ordeal, family planning officials produced a report that said her mental illness was probably caused by her physiological traits and not by the abortion.
The couple subsequently traveled to Beijing looking for help from higher officials, but AP reported that they have video footage showing Wu and Gong being hauled away by police.
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Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women's Rights Without Frontiers said that Gong Qifeng’s ensuing diagnosis of schizophrenia graphically demonstrate the untold mental and emotional violence that forced abortion unleashes against women.
“It reminds me of the searing Congressional testimony of Wujian, who suffered a late-term forced abortion in which her baby was dismembered and removed from her piece by piece while she was fully awake,” Littlejohn told LifeSiteNews.
Littlejohn said that rural China has the highest suicide rate among women in the world, and this suicide rate is increasing.
“According to the 2012 Department of State Human Rights Report on China, the number of women committing suicide has risen from 500 to 590 a day. Two of the factors cited include the traditional preference for male children [and] birth limitation policies,” she said.
Littlejohn noted that Chinese demographer Liang Zhongtang was courageous in making the pronouncement regarding the one-child policy adjustment that lets couples in which one parent is an only child have a second child.
“The system has not changed at all,” Liang was quoted to say. “It still forbids you from having more children than permitted by the government, so the game – and forced later-term abortions – are unavoidable if you want to have children the government does not allow.”
“This is absolutely true, and cuts against all the recent media coverage that China is 'easing' its one-child policy. It is not,” Littlejohn said.
“This minor adjustment will not affect many families in China. Even those families who can now have a second child will need government permission to get pregnant. If they get pregnant without a permit, they may still be subject to forced abortion,” she told LifeSiteNews. “I fully expect that we will continue to see forced abortions and sterilizations of Chinese women in 2014 and beyond.”
In regard to the couple's request for help with medical expenses for Gong's schizophrenia, Littlejohn explained that typically, women who are forcibly aborted because of an illegal pregnancy are not compensated.
“Their act of getting pregnant without a permit is considered a crime,” she said, “but because of international pressure, this couple may get some help from local officials.”
Women's Rights Without Frontiers reported that the family of forced abortion victim Feng Jianmei was compensated, because of international pressure.
“The Chinese Communist Party boasts that it has prevented 400 million lives through the one-child policy. How many of these were late term forced abortions, where the women were not compensated in any way, we will never know,” Littlejohn concluded.
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A four-minute video produced by Women's Rights Without Frontiers titled, “Stop Forced Abortion – China’s War on Women!” is available here.