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Beijing: Some 13 million abortions are carried out in
China each year, in part because there is little
education about contraception or disease for the rising
numbers of young people who are having sex.
Fewer than one in three callers to a Shanghai hotline
knew how to avoid pregnancy, and only one in five were
informed about venereal disease, the official China
Daily quoted a survey by the city’s 411 Army Hospital
saying.
“Sex is no longer considered taboo among young people
today, and they believe they can learn everything they
need from the Internet. But it doesn’t mean they have
developed a proper understanding or attitude toward it,”
the paper quoted hospital gynecologist Yu Dongyan
saying.
Until the 1990s, doctors asked for women’s marital
status at abortion clinics, which were part of the
family planning system that limited urban couples to one
child. Now, government data shows that nearly two thirds
of women who have abortions are between 20 and 29, and
most are single, the paper said.
Birth control information is mainly given to young
couples. Some single women may also be driven to seek
abortions because under current laws unmarried mothers
cannot get a “hukou” or household registration card for
their child.
Without one it is extremely hard for Chinese citizens to
get access to education, healthcare and other public
services. China also sells about 10 million abortion
pills a year, and there are many other abortions
performed in unregistered clinics, the paper quoted Wu
Shangchun, a division director at the National
Population and Family Planning Commission, as saying.
In the United States, by contrast, which has a
population less than one-quarter that of China, official
figures from the Center for Disease Control show there
were 820,000 abortions performed in 2005, excluding
California, Louisiana and New Hampshire for which no
figures were provided.
Sun Xiaohong from the education department of Shanghai’s
family planning authority said it was difficult to
promote sex education in schools because some teachers
and parents thought it would encourage teenagers to
become sexually active.
Ordinary web users in China will be banned from surfing
sex-related medical and research websites from July,
amid an Internet crackdown on pornographic online
content, that threatens to make information about sexual
health even harder to access.
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