One man is standing up to them

Here's an excerpt from a Sept. 18 news story from The Sunday Times (The London Times' Sunday edition) that warrants more than a nonchalant glimpse:

Women told how they were held down as doctors jammed needles into them to induce abortions in the seventh or eighth month of pregnancy.

One victim, Li Juan, 23, told Time that she was in the ninth month of pregnancy when a group of men pinned her down on a bed in a local clinic and plunged a poison-filled syringe into her abdomen.

“At first I could feel my child kicking a lot. Then after a while I couldn’t feel her kicking anymore,” she is quoted as saying.

Li’s baby girl appeared to be dead on delivery, but just to make sure the officials held the infant in a bucket of water next to the bed for several minutes.

This happened in Shandong province, China. This -- and more -- is what spurred 34-year-old blind legal activist Chen Guangchen to head for Beijing and talk with American diplomats and the US media. Now he's under house arrest, his TV and computer taken away.

Read on.

China shamed by forced abortions

Michael Sheridan, Far East Correspondent

HORRIFYING revelations of forced abortions and compulsory sterilisation in China embarrassed the Beijing government last week just as President Hu Jintao took the international stage. The exposure of practices that break China’s own laws governing birth control was the work of a blind man who has led a campaign to bring officials to justice for their crimes. However, Chen Guancheng, 34, the campaigner, is under house arrest this weekend in Linyi, a city of 10m people where family planning officials have committed the worst abuses documented in recent years. All involve poor people in and around Linyi, which lies in Shandong province, some 400 miles southeast of Beijing. Full story