China denied yesterday that late-term forced abortions were common and insisted they were against established practice, as a man who exposed such cases languished in jail."Regarding the abortion of eight-month-old fetuses, this is definitely something the Chinese government is opposed to," Vice Health Minister Jiang Zuojun told a news conference.
"We do not allow the abortion of elderly fetuses, such as eight-month fetuses...even if there are such cases, they are isolated cases."
Jiang declined to give an update on a case in east China's Shandong province, where blind activist Chen Guangcheng was locked up after he tried to help village women caught up in the nation's draconian population policies.
The women were forced to undergo sterilizations and later-term abortions by officials enforcing the one-child program. Jiang did not say whether anyone had been punished. But he defended China's two-decade-old one-child policy, saying it had prevented about 300 million births and helped postpone the time when the world's population reached six billion people.
"We need to continue to pursue the national family planning policy," Jiang said.
The policy requires parents in the cities to have only one child. Rural parents can have a second child if the first one is a girl.
Fetuses found in India
Thirty-five decomposed fetuses have been recovered from a well near a hospital in India's Punjab, where girls are routinely aborted despite a ban on sex-determination tests, officials said yesterday.
"A nurse has made a statement saying she has been working at the hospital for one-and-a-half months, and during this period 12 or 13 female fetuses have been destroyed," Varinder Singh Mohi, a senior government doctor, told Reuters.
The couple who run the hospital in Patran, 115 kilometers south of the state capital, Chandigarh, had been arrested, he said. The remains had been sent for tests to determine the sex of the fetuses.
Girls are commonly aborted or killed shortly after birth in many regions of India. One recent study suggested half-a-million unborn girls may be aborted each year across the country.
Many families view boys as a better asset than girls. A handful of doctors have recently been suspended or prosecuted for carrying out selection tests.
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