China Bans Sex-Selective Abortion

Faces with a growing imbalanced sex ratio among newborns — current figures suggest that 119 boys are born for every 100 girls — China announced this month that it is banning sex-selective abortion.

China’s senior family planning official Zhao Baige was quoted in China Daily as saying,

Any individual or medical organization offering illegal sex-selective abortion services will take legal responsibility.

National Population and Family Planning Commission minister Zhang Weiqing was quoted by China’s official Xinhua news agency as saying,

The Government takes it as an urgent task to correct the gender imbalance of newborns. As a new measure, the commission will start drafting revisions to the Criminal Law in order to effectively ban foetus gender detection and selective abortion other than for legitimate medical purposes.

Family planning officials also plan to launch a “Care for Girls” public relations campaign to convince families to value girls as much as boys. This will be supplemented by a plan to give parents of two girls (family size in China is strictly limited by that nation’s one-child policy) a special pension when they reach 60 in order to encourage parents not to think they have to have a male child in order to provide financial security when they are older.

Source:

China bans selective abortion to fix imbalance. China Daily, July 16, 2004.

China to outlaw selective abortion. ABC Radio Australia, January 7, 2005.

China to outlaw selective abortion. Reuters, Undated.

The China Bans Sex-Selective Abortion by Brian Carnell, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

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