But the Peking duck and liquor weren’t enough. One night, a couple of weeks before her date for giving birth, Yang’s wife was dragged from her bed in a north China town and taken to a clinic, where, she says, her baby was killed by injection while still inside her.

“Several people held me down, they ripped my clothes aside and the doctor pushed a large syringe into my stomach,” says Jin Yani, a shy, petite woman with a long ponytail. “It was very painful. It was all very rough.”

Some 30 years after China decreed a general limit of one child per family, resentment still brews over the state’s regular and sometimes brutal intrusion into intimate family matters. Not only are many second pregnancies aborted, but even to have one’s first child requires a license.

Seven years after the dead baby was pulled from her body with forceps, Jin remains traumatised and, the couple and a doctor say, unable to bear children. Yang and Jin have made the rounds of government offices pleading for restitution — to no avail.

This year, they took the unusual step of suing the family planning agency in court. The judges ruled against them, saying Yang and Jin conceived out of wedlock. Local family planning officials said Jin consented to the abortion. The couple’s appeal to a higher court is pending.

The one-child policy applies to most families in this nation of 1.3 billion people, and communist officials, often under pressure to meet birth quotas set by the government, can be coldly intolerant of violators.

While China outlaws forced abortions, its laws do not expressly prohibit or even define late-term termination.

Jin, an 18-year-old, met 30-year-old Yang in September 1998. They moved in together. A year and a half later, in 2000, they discovered Jin was pregnant but couldn’t get married right away because she had not reached 20, the marriage age.

After her birthday in April, they got married on May 5. Now all that was missing was the piece of paper allowing them to have a child. So about a month before Jin’s due date, her husband Yang set out to curry favor with Di Wenjun, head of the neighborhood family planning office in Anshan.The next day he paid for another meal with Di and the village’s Communist Party secretary and accountant. He said the mood was cordial and that the officials toasted him for finding a young wife and starting a family. But three weeks later, on September 7, when Yang was away opening a new building supplies store, Jin was taken from her mother-in-law’s home and forced into having the abortion.