Dad sues police for refusing to register twins
Print Edition
A man in south China’s Guangdong Province is suing his local police bureau after it refused to process a household registration for his twin sons unless his wife agreed to be sterilized, China National Radio reported yesterday.
The plaintiff, surnamed Chen, said the children were born in 2011 in Zhongtang Town. The boys were the couple’s first and only children, but when the father tried to register a home address for the babies, local police insisted he provide a family planning certificate to prove the births were legal, the report said.
Authorities across China are required to provide household registration for newborns regardless of the legitimacy of their birth, so Chen was under no obligation to provide such “proof.”
Also, as his babies were twins, they were classed as a single birth and therefore the family had in no way contravened the country’s family planning regulations.
Despite that, when Chen went to the township family planning office, he was told that he would not be issued with a registration certificate for the babies unless his wife agreed to the sterilization procedure, the report said.
“It’s ridiculous, I didn’t break any rule. They just assumed I had. It made no sense,” he was quoted as saying.
Chen took the decision to sue the police as his sons have now reached school age and without a household registration certificate they will be unable to begin their education, the report said.
China’s family planning policy, introduced in the late 1970s to rein in population growth, limits most urban couples to one child and most rural couples to two.
The policy was relaxed in late 2013, and couples are now allowed to have a second child if either of the parents is an only child. If their firstborns are twins, however, they cannot have a third baby.
Meanwhile, a pregnant woman in southwest China’s Guizhou Province has been told she can carry her baby to full term after earlier being ordered to abort it on the grounds she had broken local family planning rules.
Qin Yi works as a high school teacher in Libo County in Guizhou, but originates from the city of Huangshan in east China’s Anhui Province.
In February, she got married for a second time. Both she and her husband have a child from their previous marriages, but under Anhui rules, they are allowed as newlyweds to have a baby together, the Guizhou Health and Family Planning Commission said.
Although Qin had completed the necessary paperwork in Huangshan, earlier this month she was threatened with dismissal from her job as her employer claimed her pregnancy was a breach of Guizhou regulations on couples having multiple children.
These allow newlyweds to have a baby together, but only if they have no more than one between them from their previous marriages.
Following consideration of the issue, Guizhou family planning officials ruled that Qin was within her rights to have the new baby based on her Anhui residency.
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