IN THE photographs the young mother lies on a clinic bed, her hair obscuring her face. She appears as inert as the baby lying beside her. But 23-year-old Feng Jianmei is still alive, whereas her baby girl is not. The baby was killed while still in the womb by an injection arranged by local family-planning officials. They restrained Ms Feng, who was seven months pregnant, and then induced her to give birth to the dead baby.

Even three years ago, Ms Feng's suffering might have gone unnoticed outside the remote village in the north-western province of Shaanxi where she lives—just another statistic in China's family-planning programme. But her relatives uploaded the graphic pictures onto the internet, and soon microblogs had flashed them to millions of people across the country. Chinese citizens expressed their outrage online. It is not just the treatment of Ms Feng that they deplore. It is the one-child policy itself.

Prominent voices joined in the criticism. “The outrageous and violent forced- abortion incident in June is not unique to Shaanxi”, wrote Liang Jianzhang, on Sina Weibo, China's version of Twitter. Mr Liang is chief executive of Ctrip, one of China's most successful travel companies. “Abolition of the absurd family-planning policy is the only way to root out this kind of evil,” he went on. Mr Liang's post has been retweeted more than 18,000 times.

The scandal is a blow to the one-child policy's public image, says He Yafu, a demographer and critic of the policy. That image has never been good, even if in recent years many learned to live with it. In 1983, 14m women had abortions organised by family-planning committees (many of them coerced). In 2009, there were 6m. The number has declined in recent years as local officials have more incentives to impose fines on extra births rather than prevent them altogether.

The fine for having extra children is known as the “social maintenance fee”. Mr He estimates the government has collected over 2 trillion yuan ($314 billion) in such fees since 1980. Failure to pay means the second “black” child cannot obtain a household-registration document, or hukou, which brings with it basic rights such as education. The amount of the fine varies from place to place. A husband and wife in Shanghai will each pay 110,000 yuan ($17,300), three times the city's average annual post-tax income, for a second child. The fine increases with income. The rich can shell out millions.

For Ms Feng, living in a rural area, the fine was lower—40,000 yuan. She was given the option to pay and keep the baby, but could not afford it. Her husband, Deng Jiyuan, earns 4,000 yuan ($630) a month at the local hydroelectric power station, but needed more to pay the fine. So on May 30th he set off for the coal mines of Inner Mongolia to boost his income. It was then that family-planning officials swooped.

At first a dozen officials tried to force Ms Feng into a car. She fled to an aunt's house, but they broke through the gate, so she escaped to the mountains nearby, where she hid under a bed in the house of a friend. “They laughed when they found her,” says Mr Deng. An official forced her to sign a form (in theory, consent is needed) and after an injection into her belly Ms Feng gave birth to the dead baby 30 hours later.

Not the only one

The public telling of Ms Feng's story has come as others were already assailing the one-child policy. Yang Zhizhu is one of a handful of people who have publicly criticised the heavy fines. He calls them China's “terror fee”. Mr Yang and his wife refused to pay a fine for their second daughter. The transgression cost Mr Yang his job as a law professor. In April a sum of 240,300 yuan was taken from his wife's account. In protest he launched an online “begging” campaign through his microblog account.

Another reason the hold of the one-child policy has been weakening is that it is so full of loopholes. In 2007 a family-planning official estimated that the one-child policy applied to less than 40% of the population. The right personal connections can secure discounts on fines. Couples in rural areas have long been allowed to 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 the fishing industry and has been going to sea for five years, the couple may have a second child without facing punishment.

But no loophole could help Feng Jianmei. On June 14th the provincial government apologised to Ms Feng, and said family-planning officials in Shaanxi would be fired. But that deals with the symptoms not the cause. “I had no money to pay the fine,” says her husband. “But does that mean we should suffer the grief of losing a child?”