Off target

摘要

The photographs of a mother lying next to a naked newborn baby in a county hospital in northern China could have been mistaken for a joyous occasion. Closer inspection showed that the baby was dead, killed in her mother's womb in a forced abortion supervised by officials who had held her down. The infant was just a couple of months from term. Our picture shows the mother only; that with the baby is too gruesome to print. When the woman's family published the pictures online they went viral, sparking a furious debate about the country's one-child-per-couple policy and the way its rigid mandates had incentivised local bureaucrats to take a life (see page 29).