However, as earlier as 2004, the government had launched a project to break the taboos on the sex education of teenagers, which, as the abortions proved, was doomed partly because of cultural resistance and partly because of the schools' indifference towards such a subject. This effort only embarrassed the government and helped little in improving the sex education situation.
Adding to the ignorance about reproductive health and contraception, tolerance towards the once rare phenomenon of premarital sex is another cause of the rising number of abortions—8 million of such cases every year during the past decade.
For this new generation growing up in a new China that has opened up to Western cultures and lifestyles and has undergone a loosening of traditional inhibitions, premarital sex is not only considerable, but also common. It leads to cohabitation, particularly in urban areas, and abortions as a result.
Though many profiteering private hospitals, some of which could be called "quack hospitals," are claiming their abortion services do no harm to women, safety concerns remain since the surgery, no matter how excellently operated, can be harmful to the human body.
Professor Wu Shangchun noted that these young women who have multiple abortions are more susceptible to certain health problems including bleeding, infection, chronic pelvic inflammation, and even sterility.
Dangers double when these women turn to the "quack" clinics who advertise heavily with promises of painless abortions as well as strict confidentiality—both are main concerns to many pregnant single women. Once they step into such clinics, they expose themselves to possibly tainted medical instruments and unlicensed doctors, not to mention possible infections of sex-related diseases.
Experts thus call for more cautions among young women when it comes to unprotected sex; otherwise, "the price may be too painful," suggested the Chinese Women Newspaper.
