More Young, Unmarried Women In China Having Abortions, Health Experts Say
17 May 2007
An increasing number of single women, including teenagers, in China are having abortions, according to Chinese health experts, the New York Times reports. Typically, abortion has been associated with married women complying with the country’s one-child-per-family policy, the Times reports. However, the majority of women having abortions in Shanghai and parts of Beijing are unmarried. According to the Times, many single, pregnant women — including migrant workers, students, commercial sex workers and urban professionals — face “enormous social stigma and shame” and have “few options beyond abortion.”
The increase in abortions among single women is caused by many factors, including the government’s lack of focus on educating the demographic about reproductive health and contraception, the Times reports. Millions of young women have moved to cities throughout the country since the 1980s for work that often “severs them from their families and more conservative rural values,” according to the Times. A study conducted in Shanghai found that 69% of single women had premarital sex. Seven other studies conducted in various cities in China found that between 20% and 55% of the single women surveyed had undergone at least one abortion, the Times reports.
While the number of single women having abortion is increasing, the number of abortions among married women is going down, according to family planning officials and health experts. The overall abortion rate is dropping because more than 80% of married women with a child are using long-term contraception, such as intrauterine devices, or have been sterilized to comply with the one-child policy, family planning officials said. According to China’s Ministry of Health, the number of abortions in the country peaked in 1990 at 14 million but decreased to 7.1 million in 2005. Some health experts said the official figures are probably incomplete because they do not include data from private hospitals or women who use abortion-inducing pills.
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“More and more abortions are for unmarried women,” Gu Baochang, a leading scholar on family planning policy at Renmin University in Beijing, said, adding, “We can see [a trend] beginning in larger cities and the smaller cities, even down to the developing counties.” Ru Xiaomei, deputy director of China’s National Population and Family Planning Commission, said government efforts were “on the right path,” but more work remains on sex education. She added that the government was very concerned about the rise in the number of pregnancies and abortions among single women (Yardley, New York Times, 5/13).
Chinese Province Issues $77,000 Fine for One-Child Policy Violation
In related news, family planning officials in China’s Anhui province issued a record 600,000 yuan, or about $77,000, fine on a private businessman for breaking the country’s one-child policy, Reuters UK reports. Family planning officials in April warned that wealthy and famous people faced fines and a ban from future government awards for violating the policy. According to Reuters UK, previous violators of the policy usually were given a fine of a few thousand yuan. “Regardless of whether one is rich or poor, everyone should be equal before the law when family planning rules are implemented,” NPFPC Director Zhang Weiqing said. The name of the businessman was not given, Reuters UK reports (Reuters UK, 5/14).