THE WORLD - A grim tale of child abuse in China - A woman is to undergo surgery to remove some of the 26 needles stuck in her body when she was an infant.

When Luo Cuifen was 26, she found out a likely reason why.

Doctors discovered more than two dozen sewing needles embedded in her body, some piercing her vital organs.

X-rays of her head and torso look like a dart board.

Doctors believe the needles were driven into her body when Luo was days old. One in the top of her skull could only have been stuck there when the bones in her head were still soft.

"They wanted her dead," said Qu Rei, a spokesman at Richland International Hospital in Yunnan province, which has agreed to surgically remove the first six of the 26 needles in her body today. "The fact she is still alive is a medical miracle."

Luo does not remember ever being stabbed. Relatives suspect her grandparents. They wanted a grandson instead of a second granddaughter.

"I was horrified," said Luo, now 29, in an interview by phone Monday from her hospital room. "How could they do such a thing to me when I was so young?"

Luo, an impoverished farmer, has had to wait for three years for her operation because she had been unable until now to find a hospital willing to perform the difficult and expensive procedure for free.

Female infanticide is common practice in cultures that prize boys. China's strict one-child policy has exacerbated the age-old prejudice by making the male heir an even more precious commodity. Lopsided sex selection through such means as abortions has skewed the gender ratio; it now stands at about 119 boys to 100 girls. In industrialized countries the balance is closer to 107 to 100.

China's family planning restrictions have also led to a surge in child trafficking. On Friday, Chinese police rescued 40 kidnapped infants purchased in relatively impoverished southwestern China and bound for potential buyers on the country's more prosperous east coast.

Thousands of baby girls are abandoned every year. Some are left on the street or even in the trash.

Luo's case is not the first in which children have been pierced with metal objects. This year, state media reported the case of a 40-year-old woman who had suffered from headaches all her life. It turned out she had a 4-inch needle stuck in her head. Relatives said she had been born out of wedlock and passed from friend to friend as an infant. By the time she came home to stay with her mother she had developed a habit of sobbing hysterically that no one could explain.