The deliberately polarised debate is not about human rights at all: it is about politics, state power and control, writes Kristina Bentley
In June 2012 a series of pictures were published of a woman in the aftermath of a late-term, forced abortion, a casualty of China’s one-child policy. She lay sideways on a hospital bed, her hair covering her face, as if she had just been dumped there, like garbage. Next to her was the body of the seven-month baby girl that she had been forced to deliver pre-term, poisoned in utero.
The images of Feng Jianmei and her baby were pure horror. What was done to Feng and her baby was violent and obscene. She had a decision forced upon her, about her body, the size of her family and her fertility. It was the law of her country at the time. Her decision to have a second child was not deemed hers to make...