Slovenia Is Slipping Away
In the previous issue of PRI Review, the article “Europe is Dying Out” listed 13 European countries experiencing natural population decline (deaths exceeding births), as well as four other nations of Europe “on the brink” of decline. One of those four is Slovenia, which in 1993 registered 20,273 births versus 19,096 deaths for a population increase of 1,177.
The latest edition of the United Nation’s Population and Vital Statistics Report, confirms that Slovenia probably will become the 14th European nation to enter into natural population decline. The Report disclosed Slovenia’s just released 1994 vital statistics: births fell to 19,463 while deaths rose to 19,359, yielding a population increase of just 104. (Series A, Vol. XLVII, No. 4, l October 1995. (pp. 14-15)
Chinese Doctor Jailed For Aborting Female Fetuses
A report in the Shanghai-based Wenhui Bao newspaper detailed the arrest of a retired physician who had used ultrasound equipment to determine the sex of 10 fetuses, and then aborted the eight unwanted female fetuses. The doctor, Jin Meisheng, was sentenced by a provincial court to four years in prison for performing the illegal abortions between August 1994 and May 1995.
The court found Jin guilty of attempting to “disrupt social order by sabotaging China’s family planning policy,” the paper reported. Government authorities confiscated Jin’s ultrasound equipment along with about $500, the payment received for performing the abortions.
China’s strict one-child-per-family policy has markedly strengthened the society’s age-old preference for boys, to provide for the parents’ retirement and to carry on the family line.
According to official Chinese statistics, 111 boys are born for every 100 girls, compared to a 106:100 ratio in the Western world. One Chinese newspaper reported that 97.5 percent of all abortions in China were carried out on female fetuses.
Interestingly enough, the practice of sex-selective abortions in China (and elsewhere) was attacked at the recent Women’s Conference held in Beijing. The report of Dr. Jin’s prosecution appeared just four days later (The Washington Times, 20 September 1995).
[Abortion is legal in China at any gestational age, and in fact the Chinese government’s family planners have forcibly aborted women who run afoul of the one-child policy up to the point of parturition. What made these eight particular abortions illegal was that they were performed for sole purpose of sex-selection which was outlawed in the late 1980s.]
Millions Of Condoms For Zimbabwe Go Up In Smoke
Great Britain’s foreign aid department was “forced to burn” 24 million “substandard” condoms earmarked for Zimbabwe to help curb that country’s spread of HIV infection. The defective condoms were part of a consignment of 66 million sent to Zimbabwe, according to Overseas Development Minister Lynda Chalker. “The defective batch was identified during post-shipment inspection … and was burnt, in line with standard and appropriate practice for defective prophylactics,” Chalker told Parliament.
“The difficulties of quality control in the manufacture of condoms worldwide has led the ODA (Overseas Development Administration) to implement an independent testing program for the condoms it supplies under the British aid programmes,” she added (Router, London, 4 December).
Condoms Stretch Indian Tire and Rubber Prices
The increasing use of condoms to counter AIDS and curb population growth has sent Indian rubber prices soaring during the peak tapping season. Latex, the milk tapped from the rubber tree, had previously been processed into sheet rubber for use by tire manufacturers. But trade sources say that most planters were now tapping latex to produce the more remunerative concentrates used to make condoms as well as gloves and balloons.
“Latex concentrates fetch some 23 rupees (66 cents) more per kilogram than the grade used for sheet processing.” according to one top rubber dealer. The diversion of rubber supplies to condom manufacture has led to a rise in natural rubber prices and a shortage of sheet rubber, which in turn has led to higher prices for tires.
Mid-October rubber prices, during the peak of the tapping season, hit 50 rupees ($1.40) per kilogram versus an average of 36 rupees ($1) per kilogram a year ago.
India’s various family planning campaigns have heavily promoted condom usage, the demand for which was said to be 1.3 billion this year. According to the five major companies supplying condoms, the demand is likely to double in the next few years (Reuter, Coonoor, India, 7 December).
Skewed South Korean Sex Ratio
In South Korea the combination of a preference for male children and the spread of a small-family norm has sharply skewed the country’s sex ratio at birth. According to recent data, between 1985 and 1990, the sex ratio at birth rose from an average of 106 males for every 100 females — the usual ratio, absent interference, found throughout the world —— to 113 for every 100. Single-child families had ratios as high as 207 to 100; within larger families the sex ratio climbed rapidly with birth order, reaching a level of 160 to 100 for the last born child in a family of four.
According to researchers, these patterns “point clearly to the practice of sex-selection abortion.” (Republic of Korea’s National Statistical Office and the 1991 Korean Fertility and Family Health Survey as reported in International Family Planning Perspectives, Vol. 21, No. 4, December 1995, pp. 160-1.)
Bangladesh Fertility In Sharp Decline
According to the findings of the 1993-94 Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey, released in July, births per woman during the two-year period 1991-93, dropped sharply from 4.3 to 3.4 — an astonishing 21 percent decline, coming on the heels of a much more gradual decline, from 6.3 births per woman in the early 1970s, to 4.3 for the period 1989-91.
Health and Family Welfare head Chowdhury Kamal Ibne Yusuf congratulated the country’s nearly 50,000 “family planning field workers” as well as the non-government organizations who were the “driving force behind such headway” (The Pulse, Bangladesh, 16-31 July, p. 1).
Sterilization in Sao Paulo
With sterilization now legally available in Brazil, this procedure, at no cost, will soon be available through the public health system of the country’s largest city, Sao Paulo. This new program has been criticized not only by the Catholic Church but also by the Sao Paulo’s Physicians Union and its regional Council of Medicine.
Patients will have to formally request the procedure, which must be approved by a special commission. Hospitals in the city have begun to register patients seeking sterilization. The city’s mayor, Paulo Maluf, said the procedure will not be encouraged among the poor, merely made available to them (The Lancet, 21 October, p, 1090).
Fertility Shoppers Criss-Cross The Atlantic
A single in vitro fertilization (IVF) attempt in the United States typically costs about $8,000, with many American clinics charging $10,000, $15,000, or more. In Great Britain, however, private clinics specializing in infertility treatment charge about $3,500 for the same service. American “fertility shoppers” are increasingly winging their way across the Atlantic drawn by the substantially lower prices.
Dr. Peter R. Brinsden, medical director of Cambridge’s Bourn Hall Clinic, where the world’s first “test-tube baby” (Louise Brown) was born, described a number of patients “who come from the United States… have a mini-break, get down to London, and make a holiday of it,” Dr. Brinsden considered “setting up a package deal [for American fertility seekers] but [was discouraged by the] hostile reaction from the U.S.” Explained Dr. Brinsden: “It’s very lucrative and competitive over there.”
These differences in IVF costs reflect the same factors that make medical care more expensive in the United States titan in Britain; Americans demand more tests, doctors pay higher malpractice insurance premiums, and doctors, nurses and drugs all cost more. A month of fertility drugs, for instance, costs about $2,000 in the United States compared to about $600 in Britain.
Katie Hallenborg, a 37-year-old American woman in London who now has three IVF children after 23 attempts, summed it up: “With my success rate, if we had spent $ 15,000 times 23, I couldn’t have done it at home [Chicago].” (Associated Press, London, 31 October).
Taiwan Rethinks Population Policies
One of the first countries to adopt a comprehensive population control program, the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan, is now having second droughts about the programs “success.”
A new study by the ROC’s Department of Health expressed concern over the trend for Taiwan women to postpone marriage and childbirth until their late twenties or early thirties, New mothers over age 30 tend to have just one child, the study noted, calling this a threat to Taiwan’s population growth.
Plummeting birth rates also worry the Taiwan Provincial Institute of Family Planning, which for decades has promoted smaller families with slogans such as “one child is not too few.” Lately, however, the population control agency of the ROC has reversed itself and is now exerting itself in the opposite direction, urging the populace to marry and have children between the ages of 22 and 30 (Free China Journal, 8 December, p. 4).
Beijing Forces One-Child Policy Onto Tibet
The Tibetan Women’s Association, a UN.-recognized Non-Governmental Organization working inside Tibet, has filed a report indicating that the People’s Republic of China has decided to enforce its one-child policy in Tibet.
“Birth-control policy is forced… repressively on the population of Kham and Amdo,” the report said. “Mobile birth-control teams comb the countryside and pastoral areas where they round up women for abortion and sterilization. Even women well advanced in their pregnancy are forced to undergo abortion, followed by sterilization.
“Although China officially claims that its one-child birth control policy does not apply to ‘China’s Minorities,’ evidence shows that the policy implemented in China is applied to Tibet as well. Young women with one or no children are routinely sterilized. Vasectomies are forced on Tibetan men. No woman under 22 years of age is allowed to have children. Thereafter, they can have a child only with a birth permit from the authorities. Then there are various subtle birth-control policies such as restrictions on who may give birth, at what age and where, and fines up to 2000 yuan (U.S. $400) for ‘illegal’ children and incentives for one-child families, etc.”
According to one Tibetan doctor who has since escaped to India, Chinese “birth control teams” operate all over the country. “The teams have a monetary incentive to do abortions and sterilizations on as many women as possible. The more names the Chinese doctors collect, the more money they get from their government, as well as from the unwilling victims.”
The report offered this account from one Mrs. Lhankar, a 32-year old woman from eastern Tibet:
“The Chinese policy is one child per family, and we have to pay heavy fines for each extra child. In a sense, we are paying a ‘human tax.’ In 1988 the Chinese took me by force and sterilized me. Since I had more children than was officially allowed, my children were designated as illegal and deprived of all rights of citizenship as dictated by Chinese ideology. We were no longer eligible for ration cards, resident registration or travel permits. In reality, my children became non-entities.
“Along with me, nearly 30 other women were sterilized at the same time. I can say that 70 percent of the women, aged 18 and above, in my village have been sterilized. They [the Chinese] treat us like animals and use crude methods. My sister-in-law was aborted before her husband’s eyes. She was four months into her pregnancy when they took her to the clinic by force. They bound her hands and legs. A doctor, wearing gloves, put his hand into her vagina and seemed to squeeze the fetus. She became delirious and bled profusely.
“Many other pregnant women, some at seven months, were given injections in the stomach. They wailed in agony and delivered dead fetuses. While operating, medical staff often made incisions without anesthesia and with little consideration for the pain that was being inflicted. I have witnessed these terrible things with my own eyes” (National Report On Tibetan Women of the Tibetan Women’s Association, August 1995).
