CHINA: UN WORLD CONFERENCE ON WOMEN PREVIEW

Yunnan/Eng/Nat The United Nations World Conference on Women taking place in Beijing next month will focus on the place and status of women around the world. It's ironic that such a summit is being held in China, a country where having children - one of the basic rights of women - has been strictly controlled by the state. APTV has been looking at what Chinese mothers, and potential mothers must go through to keep to China's family size policy. China has a huge population of 1.3 (b) billion people, more than a fifth of the world's total. Controlling the growth of that population is seen as a priority by the government. In the seventies it launched a strict birth control regimen better known as the one child policy. That's led to crude sterilisations, forced abortions, and female babies being abandoned or even killed, especially by farming families who want a son to work on the land. The women waiting outside this Family Planning technical service have already had one child and have come for abortions or for contraceptive devices. Many are here because they've been ordered to by the authorities in their village or district. According to a Beijing University research team, 75 per cent of urban women would like to have two children but most settled for having one to avoid losing subsidies, housing, medical care, retirement benefits and even their jobs. Rural women often find themselves under pressure from their families, husbands and villagers to evade the quotas and produce more, preferably male, babies. ZHANG Qing Liang is 23 years old, and already has her one child, born one year ago. She's come more than 150 kilometers to have an IUD (Intra Uterine Device) inserted. Conditions in the centre are far from ideal. SOUNDBITE: (Yunnan dialect) The family planning service center here has four main functions. We are in charge of the information (propaganda), our role is to make the people know and understand what is the family planning and why it exists. We also deliver medicine and contraceptive and perform the contraceptive operation or abortion. We also have training programmes for nurses and countryside doctors. SUPER CAPTION: Dr Huang Ming Hua, Chief of Family Planning China's family planning policy will certainly come under examination during the UN conference. But one international family planning group is urging understanding. SOUNDBITE: Family Planning is not necessarily a topic which has got universal concensus support. People have got differing views. It's not necessarily that they are wrong, but they have different view, and I think we have got to find ways to bridge this. Because ultimately all of us are talking about how to improve the quality of life, isn't it. And if that's what we are looking at, then if there are truly abuses which are taking place, then it is a collective responsibility to find out where it is taking place, in what circumstances, so that we can take corrective action. Maybe people don't know about it because a country is so huge. SUPER CAPTION: V J Palan, International Planned Parenthood Federation The Chinese face a difficult choice. Continued population growth will undermine the economic development of the entire nation. But coldly taking policy decisions, regardless of the people's reactions can never be so straight forward. You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/youtube/f0ae54ab4d193dc860334eeeca10e874 Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork