Shenzhen abortions hold high risks for Hong Kong women

While pregnant women from the mainland have flocked to Hong Kong to give birth at the city's top-notch hospitals, thousands of pregnant Hongkongers are making the reverse journey - for a rather different reason.

They are women who want an abortion but have slipped through the net of the Hong Kong system. They are forced to turn to substandard facilities across the border because of public hospitals' reluctance to provide abortions, sky-high prices in the private sector, and the fact that the Family Planning Association can only perform abortions in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy. Poor knowledge about sex and contraception worsen the problem.

The number of women affected remains unclear, but surveys have suggested that more than a third of Hong Kong women who have an abortion each year do so on the mainland. The problem could worsen with the forced closure in September of the non-profit Hong Kong Central Hospital, which performed 40 per cent of abortions in the city .

Those crossing the border are often the most vulnerable: poor, young women who cannot afford an abortion in Hong Kong or who seek the anonymity of an operation across the border to hide their pregnancies from their parents - girls as young as 12 or 14, taken over the border for the cheap price and ease of obtaining an operation.

But in exchange for that ease, that anonymity, that price, they take on the risk of infection, infertility and trauma, with non-existent psychological support for dealing with post-abortion blues. Conditions in the best hospitals over the border are below those of even the most burdened public hospitals in Hong Kong.

The South China Morning Post found poor conditions even in hospitals with ties to well-known Hong Kong institutions. At the Peking University Hospital Shenzhen, the in-patient obstetrics and gynaecology wards were overcrowded, dark and dank.

Several women shared each room, with no curtains separating them. The walls of the ward were coated with grey, dark stains and looked in need of a paint job. There was no smell of antiseptic in the air. Patient beds spilled out of the rooms into the hallways. A woman who looked as though she had come out of major surgery lay hooked up to a machine monitoring her vital signs that any of the children running helter-skelter around the circular hallway could easily knock over.