LINYI CITY, Shandong Province, China, April 3, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A chilling photograph circulating in China shows the body of a 9-months-gestation baby submerged in a bucket of water, apparently a victim of the country’s one-child policy.

Digital Journal reports that the photograph, in which the head and arm of a child can be seen underwater in a large red bucket on the floor, was posted to the Chinese web services company Baidu before it was circulated on Weibo, the country’s version of Twitter, last week.

The abortion appears to have taken place on March 26 after Chinese family planning police in the town of Moshan hunted down the family because the couple already had one child.

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According to English reports regarding the original post, the pregnant mother was forcibly held down as she was given an injection to induce labor, after which the baby “even gave a cry when it came out,” but was left in a bucket to drown.

In response to the photo, Reggie Littlejohn of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, which opposes China’s one-child policy, confirmed that late-term abortions and infanticide are common means of enforcing China’s one-child population rule.

“These violent procedures can happen up to the ninth month of pregnancy,” Littlejohn told LifeSiteNews.com. “Sometimes the women themselves die along with their full term babies. Forced abortion is China’s war against women. It is official government rape.”

“Late term babies are injected with poison in their skulls or drowned in buckets,” she continued. “If the Chinese Communist Party wants to be a respected member of the international community, it must stop forced abortion and infanticide.”

The image and story has reportedly drawn intense outrage across China through Weibo, which has some 260 million users, since the photo began circulating on Thursday.

One commentator cited by Beijing Shots and hailing from Linyi City claimed to have witnessed such measures carried out against unborn children himself, and confirmed that Chinese officials “pounce on mothers-to-be like vampires who see blood.”

“In the hospital, a pregnant woman was dragged by several ruggedly muscular men into the operation room and did not relax their vigilance until she was injected with the drug. They said, ‘Another one accomplished.’ But that pregnant woman was near term! And her family did not even know she was kidnapped here. I later learned that she was captured when she was at a fair,” wrote the commentator.

Littlejohn pointed out that the abortion allegedly took place in Linyi, the same city where forced-abortion opponent and human rights activist Chen Guangcheng still languishes under house arrest.

Although China “has tried to convince the world that it has softened the one-child policy,” said Littlejohn, “this incident demonstrates that this is pure propaganda.”

Steven Mosher of the Population Research Institute told LSN that similar tragedies occur in China on “a daily basis,” especially in Linyi City, and that the Chinese government privately congratulates officials who commit infanticide to maintain the one-child policy.

“The Shangdong edition of the People’s Daily Online even published a story congratulating Linyi on its ‘achievements’ in family planning enforcement,” said Mosher, who has documented China’s forced abortions in on-the-ground investigations. “That’s like congratulating the People’s Liberation Army for the Tiananmen Massacre. It shows you how the brutal thugs who run China really think.”