'I could hear the baby cry. They killed my baby ... yet I couldn’t do a thing': The countless tragedies of China’s one-child policy

Millions of families paid a huge personal price for a 35-year-old state programme that failed to deliver its promised social and economic dividends. The women who were forced to have abortions still live with the trauma and society must still grapple with an ageing population

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Published: 10:45pm, 15 Nov 2015Updated: 10:45am, 4 Aug 2016

Two women and their babies pose for photographs in front of the giant portrait of late Chinese chairman Mao Zedong at the Tiananmen Gate in Beijing. Photo: Reuters

It was 25 years ago, but Mao Hengfeng still vividly remembers the piercing cries of her baby.

Yet instead of being able to hold her newborn child, she watched helplessly while her baby was drowned in a bucket.

She had been seven-and-a-half months pregnant with her fourth child. Under China’s one-child policy, she was carrying the baby “illegally” so she was dragged onto an operating table to have it aborted.

“The baby was alive, I could hear the baby cry,” she said, fighting back tears. “They killed my baby ... yet I couldn’t do a thing.”

PERSONAL COST

But that was not the end of Mao’s ordeal. While she was still suffering from severe haemorrhaging after the abortion, officials tried to force her to have a hysterectomy. She was fired from her job at a state-run factory in Shanghai. Her husband lost his business licence. When she tried to fight her job dismissal and the court threw out her case, she damaged the national emblem inside the courtroom and was taken into a mental asylum.

A man carries a child on a visit to Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Photo: AFP

That was not the first time officials had tried to get rid of her baby, she said. During her second pregnancy in 1989, she was sent to a mental asylum where she given injections, but the baby survived.