Police crack down on blood tests for baby gender
- By Wu Jin
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E-mail China.org.cn, October 20, 2016
Police in Yongjia County, Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province recently cracked down on an illegal network involved in smuggling the blood samples of pregnant mainland women to Hong Kong in order to test the gender of the fetus.
With nine months of relentless endeavor, the police arrested 11 suspects out of more than 300 people involved in the illegal business with a transaction value estimated at 200 million yuan (US$29.69 million) -- the largest case of criminal fetal gender testing so far detected in the country.
During the investigation of the illegal blood tests that can lead to termination of pregnancy (especially if the fetus is female), police and local family planning authorities maintained surveillance of several key suspects, including a man named Li, who touted the Hong Kong gender tests among the pregnant women in Leqing and Yongjia of Zhejiang Province.
Li was once a staff member of Yuhuan County People’s Hospital from which he was fired due to unclear reasons years ago. He opened a pharmaceutical store after leaving the hospital and one day found the website of a fetal test business offering to help pregnant women determine fetal genders from their blood sample sent to an agent company in Shenzhen that worked with clinics in Hong Kong.
Having convinced the Shenzhen company of his medical backgrounds, Li soon became one of their agents by introducing pregnant women to the business. He had earned hundreds of thousands of yuan before being arrested, police said.
A man named Zhou was another suspect detained. It was the second time he had been arrested for involvement in the illegal blood test business.
As a staff member from a private hospital in Leqing, Zhou used to draw blood from pregnant women and send their samples to Hong Kong for fetal gender tests, which consequently led to his arrest in 2015. Later, he was released upon bail pending trial.
However, Zhou couldn’t resist the fat rewards on offer and restarted the blood smuggling business from a flat with a constantly changing cell phone number. He was re-arrested based on the identification by several pregnant women.
Liu Yixiao, a policeman from Yongjia Police Office, said Zhou charged between 2,000 and 4,000 yuan as his commission for each blood test costing 6,000 yuan.
Xie Yongping, a team leader in Yongjia Police Office, explained: “To ascertain fetal gender by the blood samples of mothers-to-be is not illegal in Hong Kong; therefore, some agents in Shenzhen (neighboring Hong Kong) started to set up transfer stations to send blood samples there.
“Li and Zhou provided test cubes, needles, ice bags and protocols as traders positioned at the lowest end of the business chain,” said Xie.
“They disguised the blood samples as cosmetic products and left no detailed messages about the addresses of recipients, who would send couriers to collect and deliver them to a logistics center.”
With the cooperation of several pregnant women, who pretended to want a fetal gender test while working with liaison personnel in Shenzhen, the police raided several illegal organizations allegedly involved in the business. They broke into five agencies in Shenzhen and arrested 11 suspects whose confessions enabled them to chart the illegal blood-transaction business.
More than 50,000 pregnant women and 300 suspects involved in the illegal business were subsequently identified with the ring leader named Lin, who fled to Hong Kong after the raids.
Lin, 59, a Hong Kong native, had set up the colossal network of blood sample transaction in 2013 in Shenzhen. The organization extended fast to 30 subsidiaries with 120 employees and 200 regional agents.
Most employees were women born between the 1980s and 1990s, whom Lin lured with high salaries and dividends that reportedly reached 200,000 yuan a month for each core member.
Through the trans-provincial action, the police took 75 suspects into custody and have so far identified more than 40 of them.
When visiting the pregnant women involved in the illegal business, police found most of them are from rural areas where the expectations of giving birth to a boy are high especially among the women whose first child was a girl.
The Chinese mainland prohibits prenatal gender tests partly out of concern for demographic imbalance and the elimination of discriminations against females -- an old mindset still haunting families, especially those from rural towns and villages.
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