Alter family planning rules to suit reality

Libo county officials in Southwest China's Guizhou province recently ordered a woman surnamed Tan to abort her five-month pregnancy because she had violated the local family planning rule. The middle-school teacher has a child from her first marriage and her present husband has an adopted child, so she is not eligible to have another child, the officials said, warning her that she would lose her job for not following the order.

Tan obtained permission to have her second child from Huangshan, Anhui province, where the family planning rule is looser, after transferring her hukou (house registration) from Libo to Huangshan. But after some people said Tan had taken "advantage of the institutional loopholes" to have a second child, the county officials ordered her to undergo abortion.

After the media exposed the incident, Guizhou provincial family planning authorities overruled the Libo officials' abortion order and said the Huangshan permit was valid.