13 million abortions in China each year
By Jonathan Chow
13 million abortions are performed in China each year, according to China Daily, which basically means that every 365 days, China aborts the equivalent of the entire state of Pennsylvania's population.
And that's just the "legal" ones - the real number of actual abortions is estimated to be even higher. Wu Shangchun, a division director of the National Population and Family Planning Commission's technology research center, told China Daily that the "13 million" only accounts for the abortions performed in registered hospitals. What's worse, these abortions could have been prevented since "nearly half of the women who had abortions had not used any form of contraception."
Reuters quoted state media officials saying that this staggering number is:
"in part because there is little education about contraception or disease for the rising numbers of young people who are having sex...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.
Those looking to parents for discussions about "the birds and the bees" tend to be out of luck too, since Chinese families are very uncomfortable with open discussions on sexuality.
So in the end what you have is a huge population of women who are uneducated about other options and suddenly find themselves pregnant in a country with strict child bearing laws using abortion as birth control. It seems like everyone agrees that more sex education is the answer... but if that's the case, why did the government begin targeting blocked sexual health websites as part of their porn crackdown?
Photo by bracchetto