WHEN Guo Meilian found she was pregnant again, she first thought to have an abortion. Ms Guo, then 32 and living in the eastern province of Zhejiang, should not be pregnant. After she had given birth to two daughters, she had a mandatory sterilisation in 1991, organised by the local family-planning committee.

So the new pregnancy was a puzzle. But Ms Guo's biggest concern was the crippling fine an extra child would incur. Before she went in for the abortion however, friends persuaded her to have an ultrasound taken. She learned then that she was carrying twin boys. “My family knew we had to bring them into the world at all costs,” she says. It was to be a hard path.

Breaching China's one-child policy carries a severe financial penalty. Parents in Shanghai pay between three and six times the city's average yearly income in what are called “social-maintenance fees” (SMF) for extra children. He Yafu, an independent scholar and critic of the one-child policy, estimates the government has collected over 2 trillion yuan ($314 billion) in SMFs since 1980.

Mr He's calculations—which are based on the number of “unplanned” births in China (some 200m) each carrying a 10,000 yuan fine—are conservative. A husband and wife in Shanghai will each pay 110,000 yuan, based on the city's per-capita annual disposable income, for a second child. For a third child, the parent's total is 435,000 yuan. Recently, a couple in the affluent eastern province of Zhejiang made headlines when the birth of a daughter cost them 1.3m yuan ($205,000) in SMF.

Failure to pay the fine carries grave repercussions. The second “black child” cannot get a household registration, a hukou, which carries with it such basic rights as education. But backlash can be more severe. When Ms Guo's brother refused to pay his SMF, family-planning officials destroyed his house, pulling down the walls and wrecking the furniture.

This week the one-child policy's darkest side was exposed. Pictures of Feng Jianmei, a 27-year-old from the central province of Shaanxi, prostrate on a clinic bed next to her dead seven-month-old fetus (graphic, horrible), are causing outrage in local media. Ms Feng, who has a five-year-old daughter, was forced to have an abortion when her family could not produce 40,000 yuan ($6,280) for the SMF. On the evening of June 14th, the provincial government apologised to Ms Feng. The family-planning officials involved are to lose their jobs.

“This is pure murder,” says Huangsong999 on Sina Weibo, China's version of Twitter, where hundreds of thousands of microbloggers are expressing their disgust. “Are [family-planning officials] human? How could they do this without showing any humanity? China was founded over 60 years ago, but the country is full of monsters.” Authorities have since deleted the post.

Yang Zhizhu, one of a handful of individuals who are criticising the SMF publicly, calls it China's “terror fee”. Mr Yang and his wife originally refused to pay the SMF for their second daughter. The transgression cost Mr Yang his job as a law professor. In April this year, a fee of 240,300 yuan was taken from his wife's account. In protest Mr Yang launched an online “begging” campaign. “It's more like performance art to educate people about the ruthlessness of family planning”, Mr Yang explains. “I was robbed by bandits.”

The government has created plenty of incentives for couples to have only a single child. The best schools prefer children carrying a “glorious certificate for one-child parents”. Such parents can be granted a special annual allowance as well as a bonus towards their retirement assistance.

But it is difficult to enforce a policy that is so tangled with loopholes. (Considering China's perilously low birth rate and its rapidly ageing population, strict enforcement would perhaps be even worse.) In 2007 a family-planning official estimated that the one-child policy applied to less than 40% of population. Couples living in the countryside can typically have a second child if the first is a girl. Many other rules seem almost arbitrary. In Shanghai, if either man or wife works in fishing and has been at sea for five years, a couple may have a second child without facing punishment.

Others turn to more imaginative means to bypass the SMF. Dong Feng, a 33-year-old from Nanjing, is offering to be a “fake husband” for a couple willing to divorce in order to have a second child. Mr Dong is exploiting another loophole: if one of two newlyweds has no children while the other has a child from a previous marriage, a second child, a half-sibling, is allowed. Having no children of his own, Mr Dong is in a position to help a woman who has already become a mother once. He is charging 20,000 yuan for his services—ie less than most SMFs—which will involve registering a marriage, applying for fertility and birth certificates and, finally, securing a hukou for the child. Mutual non-interference in each other's personal lives is his only non-cash requirement.

For Ms Guo and her twin boys, it was her personal connections, or guanxi, that helped. At first she was asked to pay 20,000 yuan, a 50% discount in light of her failed sterilisation. She appealed to authorities through her brother, who went to school with the town chief, and got a further discount. In the end she paid only a nominal 1,000 yuan.

“But I still feel indignant”, she says. “Bringing up children is already a huge burden and the government provides no assistance—instead they take from parents. In my eyes they are thieves.”

(Picture credit: AFP)