A CHINESE drug smuggler who was forced to have an abortion has been spared the death penalty after an unprecedented campaign against the abuse of state power.

The case caused an outcry when lawyers for Ma Weihua, 29, managed to halt her trial by proving that police in the city of Lanzhou had signed a form authorising doctors to terminate Ma’s pregnancy against her will.

Under article 49 of the Chinese criminal code, pregnant women may not be executed and some detectives claim that drug dealers use such women as couriers for this very reason.

The abortion took place even before the charges against Ma were heard in court. At her retrial, a court in Lanzhou found her guilty of transporting 1.6kg of heroin and sentenced her to life imprisonment.

The image of a pregnant woman being dragged to the operating table by uniformed police officers so that her baby could be aborted has outraged public opinion in China, where the reputation of the Public Security Bureau (PSB), held responsible, is already poor. But it was thanks to Weng Weihua, a determined defence lawyer, and the South China Weekend News, a campaigning newspaper, that Ma’s plight turned into a national cause célèbre.

It also cast light on a rarely seen underworld of crime and repression that simmers beneath the surface of China’s fast-growing economy.

Ma became involved with drug traffickers while working in the western province of Xinjiang. In the city of Urumqi, notorious as a narcotics transit point from central Asia, she took a call from a heroin dealer named Sa Liha early last January, according to police evidence given in court.

Sa had a proposition for her. She was to buy a train ticket to Lanzhou, a polluted industrial metropolis in northern China with a large addict population.

There are no security checks on Chinese trains so the journey should have been risk-free. But the police claim that they were bugging Sa’s cellphone. When Ma arrived for a rendezvous the drug squad lay in wait.

A routine medical examination revealed that she was about seven weeks pregnant. She said she was not aware of her pregnancy until this moment.

The Lanzhou Chengguan detention centre refused to hold a pregnant woman, but after several weeks of argument Li Junyi, head of the drug squad, had a brisk solution.

On February 18, Li signed a form ordering an abortion. Normally a general anaesthetic is not used so early in pregnancy. But the form, produced in court, said that the anaesthetic was required “because the patient was unwilling to co-operate” and noted that the police “requested forced implementation”. The formulaic language suggested that forced abortions were not unusual.

When Ma met her lawyer six weeks later she told him: “I wanted to give birth.”

Taking on the PSB is a daunting task. But Weng, a tough defence counsel, realised that he had an opportunity for once to hold them to account.

The South China Weekend News, based in the more liberal city of Guangzhou, printed a detailed investigation of the case. Other Chinese media followed and soon internet chat rooms were abuzz with daring complaints about the PSB.

On November 15 the case was heard again, resulting in a life sentence. Ma may still appeal against the conviction.

Lanzhou PSB’s chief of propaganda said that an investigation was under way.

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