Her method, authorities and victims say, was cruel and effective: convincing families that their babies were dead or dying, or afflicted with incurable diseases or congenital deformities. In rural China, a lack of support and restrictions on family size can make people reluctant to raise a child with disabilities.
Police say the doctor's victims were often friends and neighbors, forced to make heart-wrenching decisions about whether their babies should live or die, thus becoming complicit in their purported deaths. Zhang, the families say, even charged them a fee of about $10 to dispose of the corpses.
Zhang is believed to have frequently preyed on the fears of the grandparents, who in the Chinese countryside are desperate for healthy grandchildren to carry on the family line. The mothers were frequently left out of the loop.
Part of the reason this could happen is that health care is not sufficient to care for certain babies who could otherwise survive, or a lack of support for people raising children with disabilities:
A generation ago, unwanted babies in rural China were dumped in a well or smothered. Zhang Wei of the Enable Disability Studies Institute, a Beijing-based advocate for the disabled, said a disabled child still makes life very difficult for rural families.
"The whole burden comes down on the family. There is nobody to help them, no money and no education about what they can do, so they abandon the baby," Zhang Wei said.
However, perhaps the most shocking example happened with a family who was convinced to give up a baby who was claimed to neither be clearly male nor female, due to the dishonor it would bring on the family:
"He is not completely male, but not female. It will bring shame on the family," whispered the doctor, Zhang Shuxia, a trusted family friend whom they affectionately called "Auntie." "Don't worry," Dong recalled Zhang telling him. "Auntie can help you."
She advised that Dong and his mother give up the baby, euphemistically, to let him be euthanized.
Now I understand that parents of newborns are probably vulnerable, particularly ones without a high level of education and sophistication, but can you imagine choosing to euthanize your child just because it failed to conform to particular social norms that had nothing to do with its health? Of course it is difficult to raise a child who is different in these ways, but it has nothing to do with actual physical disability and everything to do with a natural human intolerance for difference. People put enormous pressure on each other to conform, often enforced with bullying and shaming. Although sociopaths don't feel the same sort of pressure to conform or enforce conformity, I can imagine that they would use this pressure people feel against them, if it would benefit them. That's why I wonder about the obstetrician. Either way, the antidote is to be self-actualized and to not fear the opinion of the masses, something that these princess boys have down (and Bradley Manning, apparently, good for him).
