it's complicated

By Diogenes ( articles ) | Jul 30, 2009

 Roughly 13 million abortions are performed every year in China, Reuters reports. Thus the Asian superpower, which has roughly 4 times the population of the US, has more than 10 times as many abortions.

Why? Reuters offers the politically correct explanation that "there is little education about contraception or disease for the rising numbers of young people who are having sex." That formulation makes it seem that the lack of education, not the higher incidence of sexual intercourse, is the primary factor. 

Reality check: If women don't have intercourse, they won't have abortions. The keep-your-pants-on approach to population control is simple and effective. Regrettably, it seems that this technique-- the product of centuries of advanced medical research in the Western world-- has not yet  been introduced to Shanghai. At least that's the impression we receive from the Reuters story, which reports: "Fewer than one in three callers to a Shanghai hotline knew how to avoid pregnancy..."

It's very complicated, this matter of avoiding unintended pregnancies. Men can accomplish it, but women evidently cannot, unless they have all the latest information made available by Planned Parenthood and its allies. Information is the key, you see. Any information. Reuters continues:

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.

The poor, benighted youth of Shanghai, deprived of the information on "sexual health" that they might have derived from porn sites!