China To Limit Abortions For ‘Non-Medical Purposes’

China will reduce the number of abortions performed for “non-medical purposes”, the country’s cabinet has said, in the latest apparent attempt to reverse its declining birth rate.

China has already enacted strict measures aimed at preventing sex-selective abortions, and health authorities warned in 2018 that the use of abortion to end unwanted pregnancies was harmful to women’s bodies and risked causing infertility.

The state council said the new guidelines, issued on Monday, would aim to improve women’s overall access to pre-pregnancy healthcare services. However, the policy appears to be another part of Beijing’s attempt to reverse the country’s declining birth rate, which thinktanks and policy researchers have identified as a major social policy challenge in the coming decades.

China remains the world’s most populous nation but the latest census showed population growth from 2011 to 2020 was the slowest since the 1950s and was expected to slow even more within a few years. The fertility rate fell from 1.6 live births per woman in 2016 to 1.3 per woman in 2020.

After years of trying to limit population growth, Beijing is now promising new policies aimed at encouraging families to have more children.

It said in June that it would now allow all couples to have three children instead of two. New policies designed to reduce the financial burden of raising children are also being introduced.

However, the latest policy initiative highlights concern in Beijing about China’s high number of abortions, which has been encouraged by the country’s family planning policies.

For the past several decades, terminations have been used alongside contraceptives and sterilisation to keep a lid on population growth. According to government statistics, doctors in China performed 336m abortions in the years from 1971 to 2013.

Sex-selective abortions were common, meaning that China has been left with a massive gender imbalance of 30 million more men than women.

The drift towards more limits on abortion has been under way for several years. Jiangxi province issued guidelines in 2018 stipulating that women more than 14 weeks pregnant must have signed approval from three medical professionals before having a termination.