(Minghui.org) Ms. Wu Junfang of Handan City, Hebei Province, was forced to have an abortion when she was 18 weeks pregnant, shortly after she was arrested on June 18, 2008, for practicing Falun Gong.
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual discipline that has been persecuted by the Chinese communist regime since 1999.
Ms. Wu recounted her ordeal.
I was arrested in May 2008 by several police officers. They ransacked my home and confiscated my Falun Gong materials.
I wasn’t allowed to sleep that night at the local police station. I was horrified by the screams of people in nearby cells who were beaten in the middle of the night.
Because I was pregnant, the Handan No. 2 Detention Center refused to accept me. The police extorted 1,000 yuan from my family and forced them to write a statement promising not to let me practice Falun Gong, before releasing me.
The police arrested me again on the afternoon of June 18, 2008, while I was taking care of my father, who was terminally ill.
I was then taken to Matou Hospital. The doctor restrained me on a bed and injected me with unknown drugs. My baby was soon aborted. The doctor even showed me the baby to torment me. He looked so miserable; his hands and feet were stiff. My whole world collapsed.
I don’t know how I survived. What had made the police and doctor kill an innocent baby?
When my husband came to see me later, the police chief even blamed me for the abortion and attempted to make my husband beat me. Knowing that his heart was also broken, I asked him to take me home instead of staying in the hospital.
My father passed away a month after my arrest.
I was transferred to Handan No. 2 Detention Center on June 26, 2008, and then given two years of forced labor at Hebei Province Women's Labor Camp on July 6.
The guards handcuffed me with another practitioner overnight because we refused to sign the statements to renounce Falun Gong.
The labor camp strictly restricted our use of the restroom. Many inmates did not dare to eat enough for this reason. I only ate a little to maintain enough strength for the more-than-ten-hour daily work. Some inmates had to relieve themselves in the washbasin. They would be punished when they were discovered.
On one occasion, I could not hold it and had to go. I was slapped in the face by the team captain and forced to stand for more than two hours as punishment.
Another practitioner named Fang Hua couldn’t defecate after holding her urine for too long. One of her legs became severely swollen and she fainted. She was held in the hospital for three days to discharge the urine built up in her body. After she came back, the guards shocked her with an electric baton and forced her to say that she had faked her symptoms.
We were forced to work more than ten hours every day. We made disposable chopsticks wrappers, pesticide stickers, small paper bags for hotels, medicine bottle caps, and other items.
At the end of 2008, I refused to do the heavy labor. The prison guards handcuffed me from the back and then lifted my hands to cause pain in my shoulders.
They electrically shocked me and hit me with a thick book. They pinched my arms and face. One guard stomped on my legs and feet with her high heels. I had difficulty walking for several months afterward.