The Following is Statement Issued by a Former Family Planning Office and was featured in a Conference by the Laogai Reseach Center USA).

Statement of Gao Xiaoduan (Gao Xiaoduan, 1/24/2002) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Statement of Gao Xiaoduan Former Planned Birth Officer For fourteen years, I served as a planned birth officer in the Fujian province of China. With this identification card, I enforced the one child policy with whatever means necessary. A wife and mother myself, I worked in an office lined with files on women, detailing the most personal nature of their health from their menstrual patterns to records of contraception insertions. This is a photograph of my office's exterior. Slogans line the front wall instructing that giving birth is only permissible to married couples that have received government permission. This photograph of my office shows the cage where family members of women who became pregnant illegally were detained. Aside from detainment, my office, under my leadership, dismantled homes, sterilized women, and aborted infants to enforce the planned birth policy. I am not a doctor, and yet I controlled the reproductive health care for all women in my town. During this fourteen-year tenure as a planned birth official, I witnessed great suffering of those who violated the population policy. Many of them were crippled for life, while others were victims of mental disorders resulting from their abortions. Families were ruined or destroyed. I myself did so many brutal things, yet at the time, I thought I was implementing the policy of the Communist party, and that I was an exemplary citizen, a good cadre. Once I watched a woman nine months pregnant undergo an abortion. She had no other children, but had not yet received her certificate allowing her to give birth. According to policy, this too warrants an abortion. After this experience, I could no longer bear seeing mothers grief-stricken by induced delivery and sterilization. I could not live with this on my conscience. After all, I am a mother as well. To be a planned birth officer is to take on a role of great pressure. Should an officer allow mothers to exceed the birth quotas of a town, the legal consequences would befall the officer. The Chinese government is far more concerned with the results than the methods a local officer may take to achieve them. In that sense, a birth control officer's job is somewhat open-ended. While detainment of family members and dismantling of homes may not be included in official doctrine, there is very little to prevent local officers from resorting to those practices to save their own jobs. I know very little about the UNFPA, but I do know that any organization that is contributing to China's population control policy is encouraging these officials to implement forced abortion, sterilization, and punishments ranging from detainment to house destruction as means of enforcement. I learned that this is an unacceptable way to live as a human being, and I can only hope that China soon realizes this as well.