By Dave Andrusko

An incredibly brutal story coming out of south China is a grim reminder that forced abortion is still a brutal reality.

According to numerous published accounts, the forced abortion occurred in the city of Xiamen, across the coast from Taiwan. The common summary thread is

"An eight-months pregnant woman was dragged from her home and forced to have an abortion because she had broken China's one-child-per-family law," as the Daily Mail's Peter Simpson described it yesterday. "Twelve government officials entered Xiao Aiying's house where they hit and kicked her in the stomach, before taking her kicking and screaming to hospital. There, the 36-year-old was restrained as doctors injected her with a drug to kill the unborn baby."

While that captures the horrific crux of the story, further details paint an even more brutal picture. Xiao Aiying and her husband Luo Yanquan already have a nine-year-old daughter. They thought they were exempt from the one-child policy because it's more rigorously enforced in the rural areas of the country's western region and the worse thing they expected would be fines.

"The policy is complicated. We weren't entirely sure about it," Luo said, according to QMI AGENCY. "I protested. The baby was eight months. That's a living being. You can't just get rid of a life."

He was about to bring officials a copy of his wife's most recent ultrasound (having convinced them to give him 24 hours to come up with some sort of solution), "But when he arrived home to fetch the documents, he said he found his wife surrounded by people holding her arms behind her back and kicking her in the stomach," according to QMI Agency. "They dragged her away, he said."

In its account NPR mentioned how this story paralleled a story it had run in 2007. "In that case, Wei Linrong of Guanxi Province said she was seven months' pregnant with her second child when family planning officials came to her house and demanded that she report to the hospital for an abortion," wrote NPR's Bill Chappell.

"The country's official China Daily says that some 13 million abortions are performed in China each year," Chappell wrote. 'But that report also warned that the actual number could be far higher, as "figures are collected only from registered medical institution.'"

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