Birth control quota reached by paying prostitutes to abort
Family planning authorities in Leiyang, Hunan province, offered money to pregnant prostitutes for abortions so they could meet family planning quotas.
According to an official document uploaded to a mainland bulletin board, Vice Mayor Xie Zhichun accused officials of laziness at a meeting on population and birth control last month.
He said much of the birth control data had been forged, and accused cadres of paying pregnant prostitutes for their operations, China National Radio said yesterday.
According to the report, Tan Caiyu, the party committee's head of propaganda, admitted officials had forged data, but denied that all the women who had abortions were prostitutes.
Asked why they had done this, Mr Tan said it was to meet quotas set by senior officials in the city.
'Everywhere has an abortion quota, which helps keep births at a low level,' Mr Tan was quoted as saying, adding that Leiyang's officials were not the only ones to do this.
The report said local cadres waited outside a local hospital and paid pregnant women who wanted to have abortions to register under names provided by the government. In an official statement responding to the criticism, Leiyang's government had said it was investigating and would punish officials involved, Xinhua reported.
The local government could not be reached for comment last night. A staffer at Leiyang Family Planning Bureau who picked up the phone in the director's office said he knew nothing about the issue.
The mainland has a very tight and effective birth control policy that has been criticised on occasion for being brutal. Dozens of cases in small villages and towns have been exposed of women being forced into late-stage abortions and sterilisation by local family planning officials.
Officials who fail to meet their targets may not be promoted and could even be demoted, something experts say might be a key motive for their behaviour.
Lu Ying, a law professor at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, said the country as a whole needed a birth control plan.
But she said the result-oriented strategy of the central government was not being properly implemented by local officials.
'I heard that, in some places, the quota is the only standard to evaluate birth control work, and that is absolutely wrong,' she said.
Since prostitution was illegal on the mainland, Professor Lu said she did not want to make any assumptions about why Leiyang family planning officials chose prostitutes.
She said the officials guilty of forging documents ought to be punished.
According to the leaked Leiyang document, from last October to the end of March the city recorded 12,200 birth control operations, including sterilisation and abortion.
Mr Xie appraised this as a 'fruitful effort'.
Fear factor
Officials in Leiyang, Hunan province, have been accused of paying prostitutes to have abortions so they could meet population quotas
From last October until the end of March, the city recorded this many birth control operations: 12,200
