This dramatic narrative, told in the voice of a former population-control worker, reveals the steep price that China has exacted from its people to achieve its stunning decline in birthrate. Chi An, a serious student and dedicated party activist from Shenyang, Manchuria, was trained as a nurse during the Cultural Revolution. When the Chinese government launched its sweeping family-planning campaign during the early 1980s, Chi An - then a young mother - was recruited as a population-control worker. She was trained to enforce the "one-couple, one-child" policy through coercive peer counseling, pressuring uncooperative women to "think clear" about their pregnancies. She hunted down runaway women who were "illegally pregnant" and helped administer forced sterilizations, late-term abortions, and in cases where women carried their illegal fetuses to term, lethal injections at birth. Disturbed by a series of harrowing "birth-control" experiences, Chi An applied for a visa to join her husband, who was studying at a university in the U.S. Not long after she arrived in America, the tables were turned: Chi An found herself pregnant. Since Chi An and her family planned to return to China, she was forced to seek permission from Chinese officials to have a second child. The Chinese authorities responded with a resounding no, insisting that Chi An "fix this problem as soon as possible." After much anguished debate, Chi An and her husband decided to cut their ties to their homeland and applied to the U.S. government for asylum. America was not responsive and, instead, initiated deportation procedures. China expert Steven Mosher stepped in, helping Chi An win her case and ultimately effecting a policy change that protects families in similar situations. In a deeply compelling account that recreates the struggles of one woman from the other side of the globe, A Mother's Ordeal illuminates a successful, if frightening, program that is just beginning to make headlines in the West. At the same time it sheds significant light on the larger issue of choice, which is at the forefront of American political debate.
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