Selective abortions to be outlawed in China

Jan 17, 2005 / 22:00 pm

According to a report in the publication “China Daily,” the Chinese government is set to pass a law that would prohibit parents from aborting their unborn children based on the child’s sex.  The government believes this would correct the disproportion between the number of boys and girls in the country.

China’s family planning policy has only allowed each couple to have one child in an attempt to control the population growth, but this has created a lack of balance between the sexes, since parents tend to abort the child if it is female and try again to conceive a male. As a result there is 20 per cent more boys than girls.

Chinese parents tend to favor having male children as they are considered more capable of contributing to the livelihood of the family, taking care of parents advanced in age, and passing on the family name, since women become part of the nuclear family of their husbands.

The one-child policy has reduced the annual growth of China’s population, which is currently 1.3 billion, one-fifth of the world’s total population.

The president of the State Committee on Population and Family Planning, Zhang Weiqing, said the State wishes to eliminate this unbalance and therefore his committee will “begin a review of the Penal Law to effectively prohibit the determination of the sex of the fetus.”

Likewise, selective abortions will be prohibited, by which the mother obtains an ultrasound and decides to get an abortion if the baby is determined to be female.  Despite attempts to address the disproportion between the sexes, the government says it will maintain its policy limiting couples to one child.