China's cabinet on Monday said that it will curtail the number of abortions performed conducted for “non-medical purposes,” in its latest undertaking to reverse its declining birth rate. In its new guidelines, the Chinese government said that the clap down is aimed at improving the reproductive health of Chinese women.
A legislature has been passed that lays harsh measures to prevent sex-selective abortions. In 2018, the health authorities have warmed operating abortions to get rid of unwanted pregnancies was dangerous for women's bodies and can increase the risk of infertility.
The new guidelines have been designed to improve women’s complete access to pre-pregnancy health care services, said the state council. However, the think tank and policy researchers have called the decreasing birth rate in China to be the biggest social policy challenge in the forthcoming decades.
China remains the most populated nation, however, the recent census has shown the nation’s population growth from 2011 to 2020 has remained slow since the 1950s. While think tanks and policies researchers have said that it would be even slower within a few years.
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The fertility rate amongst Chinese women has dropped from 1.6 live births per woman in 2016 to 1.3 per woman in 2020.
Beijing over several years has been trying to limit its population, but now is promising new schemes and policies that aim at encouraging couples to have more children.
China in June allowed all couples in the country to have three kids instead of two while assuring them of all sorts of support.
Amongst many of the new government policies being introduced, one is designed to lower the financial burden of raising children.
The latest policy of initiated highlights concerns about the increasing number of abortions in China, which was supported and backed by the country’s family planning policies.
For many years, Chinese authorities had used terminations, contraceptives and sterilisation to check on the population growth.
As per government stats, from the year 1971 to 2013, doctors in China have performed 336 million abortions in the country.
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The slow shift towards clamp down on more abortions has been ongoing for several years now.
In 2018, Jiangxi province issued guidelines specifying that women who are more than 14 weeks pregnant must have an approved and signed document from three medical professionals before getting the pregnancy termination.