Population and abortion policies in China: Their impact on minority nationalities

Abstract

The history of abortion in China is closely linked to the evolution of the country's population policy over the past four decades. Abortion in China has been legal since 1953 and is widely available through services offered by the country's national family planning program. In 1971, following the uncertain period of the Cultural Revolution (1965–1968), the government of China, confronting the reality of its population size — which in 1970 was estimated by the United Nations at 800 million people — decided to make a concerted effort to lower demographic growth by means of an effective birth planning campaign and services, backed up with legal and safe abortion. Within a decade, in 1979, China strengthened its policy and imposed on the population a reproductive norm allowing for only one child, known as the One-Child Family Policy. Ethnic minorities were at first exempt from demographic policies but more recently pressure has been increasingly applied to them to control their fertility. Abortion is now prevalent among nearly all Chinese ethnic minorities. Because of their remoteness and less favorable socio-economic circumstances, minorities lack access to quality services that would lower or make abortion unnecessary. The paper represents an effort to reverse the gap and confusion in the existing literature on ethnic group response to population and family planning policies in China.