China has been scrambling to reverse its population decline for several years now, but one hospital is being fiercely criticized for its take on the problem. Heyuan Youhao Hospital in Heyuan, in Guangdong province, southern China has posted signs discouraging women from having abortions — but it’s the odd, propagandistic tone of the signs that is really raising eyebrows.
The South China Morning Post reported that the hospital erected a “Family Education Public Welfare Exhibition,” which included a number of signs featuring messages that discourage abortion mainly from the angle of how abortion might affect men, or the family as a whole. The signs featured unusual sayings, such as, “Abortion cuts the male’s ancestral blood ties and harms the vitality of the male’s family,” and “Children born to mothers who have had abortions tend to be rebellious, prone to anger, disrespectful to parents, underweight, have lower IQs, and weaker health.”
Another sign emphasized the importance of honoring family, featuring the message, “Filial piety is the foremost among all wholesome deeds, and sexual misconduct is the worst of all unwholesome deeds.” The signs also featured images of girls to show examples of “bad-tempered children,” and boys to show “good-tempered children” — further highlighting the continued, systemic preference for male children in China.
People who saw the signs were shocked. “Abortion clearly harms women’s bodies, but somehow this has been twisted into harming the man and his family. This is really absurd,” one person said.
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Another added that gender-based abortion is widespread, with one resident pointing out, “These slogans seem aimed at scaring the male family members into stopping this practice, ‘using magic to defeat magic.’”
Feng Yuan, co-founder of Equality, a Beijing-based NGO focused on gender equality, disagreed. “To intimidate men into avoiding sex-selective practices for unborn children does not truly advocate for gender equality, nor does it effectively promote the mental and physical well-being of pregnant women,” she said. “The root of such actions likely does not lie within the hospital itself.”
Last year, the Chinese government admitted that the country’s population had dropped for the second year in a row. Fertility rates in China are among the lowest in the world, and attempts to encourage births have failed so far.
The One Child Policy, instituted in 1980, caused many of the current population problems. Created with the help of the United Nations Population Fund and the International Planned Parenthood Federation, couples who violated the policy faced punishments ranging from fines to being dragged off the streets and forced into abortions. A cultural preference for sons, as noted in the hospital’s messaging, led to a huge gender imbalance, which further led to millions of missing Chinese girls and an epidemic of human trafficking.
Tell President Trump, RFK, Jr., Elon, and Vivek:
Stop killing America’s future. Defund Planned Parenthood NOW!
