CHINA:A young Chinese woman has begun surgery to have 23 sewing needles removed from her body, which doctors believe were stuck deep into her as a baby by her grandparents.
They wanted to kill her so her family would produce a son instead.
Doctors say it looks like a case of attempted female infanticide because some of the needles were pushed into the soft spot on the top of her head that all babies have before the bones knit.
Luo Cuifen, now 29, was a second granddaughter, leaving the family no hopr of a treasured boy child. Under the one-child policy, most families are limited to one offspring, but people may be allowed to have a second in rural areas if their first is a girl.
The needles are about 2.5cm long and X-rays show how they have worked their way into her lungs, liver, bladder and kidneys, making their removal risky, said Qu Rui, a spokesman for the Richland International Hospital in Kunming, capital of Yunnan province, before surgery began to remove the first six needles.
There is a strong cultural bias in rural China against baby girls, who are sometimes called "maggots in the rice". In rural China there is a saying that "raising a daughter is like watering someone else's fields".
Having a son is the closest thing to a pension plan most rural Chinese will ever have - sons are supposedly better able to provide for the family and support their elderly parents.
Because of the prejudice against girls and the pressures of the one-child policy, many women do not report their pregnancies and if the child is a girl, they kill the baby. Thousands of baby girls are abandoned every year, some of them discarded on rubbish heaps.
Ms Luo has suffered from inexplicable anxiety and insomnia over the years, as well as depression. Doctors from Canada and the United States will join Chinese doctors for the operation.
China has the most unbalanced gender ratio - 119 boys born for every 100 girls, compared with the Western average of 104-107 boys for every 100 girls.
Ms Luo's grandparents are dead and there was no mention whether there would be any investigation into how the needles got there.