On February 8, 2017, Mr. Hu, his wife and children, returned to his hometown, Luokan Town, Zhenxiong County, in the Yunnan Province, to celebrate the Chinese New Year. The officials of the Birth Control Office in Luokan Town dragged him out of his house and forced him to have a vasectomy. The officials claimed that Mr. Hu had three children from his first marriage and had already violated the Chinese Family Planning regulations. “As a result, the Birth Control Office in Luokan Town has the legal right to force Mr. Hu to have a vasectomy operation,” said the staff members of the office. After Mr. Hu’s family reported the incident to the local police, the staff members of the Birth Control Office threatened that if Mr. Hu did not have the vasectomy, his wife would be arrested and detained for 15 days under the accusation of having disturbed the public security. The news was reported on February 14, 2017 by the government-run Beijing Youth Newspaper.
According to the Birth Control Regulation Office of Yunnan Province, remarried couples who have more than two children from their previous marriages are not eligible to apply for having another child (the third child). In Mr. Hu’s case, he had three children from his first marriage and one child from his second/present marriage. He was considered to have broken the law. The local Birth Control Office reasoned that they had just implemented the law by forcing Mr. Hu to have the vasectomy.
There have been reports that some local governments took violent actions to force people to have sterilizations and vasectomies. Sometimes, officials working for the Birth Control Offices would appear suddenly (without any notice) in a village or a town to check on targeted people, who then were taken forcefully to the local Birth Control office, school, a patrol van or truck for the operation of sterilization. To cover up their actions, the government often addressed such situations as “providing door-to-door family planning service” and “efficient arrangements of operations.” The local staff in the Birth Control offices were more task-oriented. After they had several cases of forced sterilization, they wrote reports to their superior offices to show their merits. In many cases, the operations of sterilization were performed in poor medical facilities by unskilled surgeons, and many people suffered medical accidents, which harmed them both physically and psychologically.