A story of forced late-term abortion and torture in China has recently come to light.
One year ago, a woman in China's Henan Province was sentenced to five years in prison because she refused to give up her faith in Falun Gong, and refused to curse the spiritual practice as ordered by the Chinese government. However, only recently was her story published on overseas websites in order to direct international attention to China's human rights issues.
On July 19, 2004, officers from the Huaiyang County Lutai police station seized Wang Jingui from her home. Ms. Wang was nine months pregnant at that time. She was sent to the Huaiyang County Birth Control Center, where eight men held her down on an operating table and forcibly aborted her child. The county government decreed a five-year sentence for Ms. Wang.
She is not the only member in her family to suffer abuse by local authorities. Her husband, Song Zhenling, also practices Falun Gong. On Oct. 3, 2000, he was tortured by Ren Wei from the 610 Office, a department specifically created by the Chinese Communist Party to persecute Falun Gong. Ren Wei and the director of Lutai Police Station struck Mr. Song's face with a pair of shoes more than 70 times and kept his arms tightly bound for extended periods, hoping the pain would force him to give up the practice of Falun Gong.
In May 2004, Mr. Song suffered severe tortures in a detention center that left him both paralyzed and blind. Afterwards, the Zhoukou City Chuanhui Court sentenced him to a 10-year term at the detention center.
Mr. Song’s wife has been imprisoned several times for refusing to stop practicing the ancient form of qigong exercise, and for telling other people about the cruel persecution that the CCP has inflicted upon Falun Gong.
Falun Gong, also called Falun Dafa, was made public in China in 1992, and received many awards from Chinese public security departments and qigong associations. In 1998, a government survey found that more than 100 million people in China practiced Falun Gong, outnumbering the membership of the CCP. In July 1999, the former head of the CCP, Jiang Zemin, outlawed Falun Gong for fear that the large number of people threatened the CCP.
According to the sources in the “Nine Commentaries on the Chinese Communist Party,” most members of the CCP's Political Standing Committee were against the ban at the time, and Qiao Shi from the People's Congress also expressed his disapproval. It is estimated that hundreds of millions of Falun Gong practitioners and their families have suffered persecution since July 1999.
It is hard to obtain the exact amount of death cases of Falun Gong practitioners in China; however, overseas Falun Gong practitioners have verified the details for about 2,600. This number is recognized to be only a fraction of the actual figure, and the number is still growing.
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