China: Abortions surge, sex education to blame
30 July 2009, The New York Times
Author: MARK McDONALD
More than 13 million abortions are performed each year in China, far more than any other country in the world, according to statistics disclosed by Chinese health officials.
Even the official figure shows a marked increase in Chinese abortions, based on statistics from 2003, the last year for which reliable data are available. In a joint report, the World Health Organization and the Guttmacher Institute put the number of abortions in China at 9 million, out of a total of 42 million worldwide that year.
The rate of abortion in China - about 24 abortions for every 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44 - is far from the world's highest. Russia has by far the highest rate at 53.7 per 1,000, according to the United Nations Population Division. Some two million abortions are performed each year in Russia, which has a population of 142 million. China's population is 1.3 billion.
Officials blamed a low level of sex education among young people for the widespread use of abortion in China.
More than 70 percent of callers to a pregnancy phone line at a Shanghai hospital knew almost nothing about contraception, China Daily reported. Only 17 percent were aware of venereal diseases, and less than 30 percent knew that HIV/AIDS could be transmitted sexually.
"Sex is no longer considered taboo among young people today, and they believe they can learn everything they need from the Internet," Yu Dongyan, a gynecologist, told the paper. "But it doesn't mean they've developed a proper understanding or attitude toward it."
A Chinese cultural preference for sons, combined with the state's longstanding one-child policy, has resulted in a widening use of gender-selective abortions and "an imminent generation of excess men," according to a recent report in the online British Medical Journal. There are now 32 million more Chinese boys than girls under 20, the researchers found, an imbalance that is expected to widen over the next 20 years.
Abortion has been legal in China since 1953, although sex-selective abortions were banned starting in 1994. China was the first country to approve mifepristone, the abortion-inducing drug also known as RU-486, and by the late 1990s it was widely available - by prescription and on the black market - all across China.
Wu Shangchun, a research official with the National Population and Family Planning Commission, told China Daily that about 10 million abortion-inducing pills are sold annually in China.
Abortions at registered clinics in China cost about $88.
Nearly half of the women who had abortions had not used any form of contraception, Ms Wu said. About 60 percent of the women who have abortions are between 20 and 29 years old, and most are single.
