China population: hospital caught offering illegal baby gender selection for potential parents ordered to cease service
- The hospital offers services such as a ‘LST baby tailor-making’ technology to assure a gender selection success rate as high as 99 per cent
- Chinese law bans fetus’ gender identification at health institutions except in the condition that there is a medical reason
Health authorities in the southwestern Chinese city of Chongqing have ordered a hospital to cease offering baby gender selection services.
Edward Hospital, a private facility in the city’s Shapingba District, earlier this month launched the fetus customisation service, claiming that they can help people have boys if they want or girls, Chongqing TV reported.
The hospital offered three packages at different prices. The most expensive one is described as “LST baby tailor-making” technology combined with the hospital’s “excellent traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) expertise” to assure the success rate as high as 99 per cent, according to the hospital’s advertisement, the report said.
A doctor from the hospital, surnamed Yang, told Chongqing TV she is not sure precisely what LST technology is, but said she understood it to be imported from the UK, Germany and Japan.
Officials punished after allowing a family to violate one-child policy
The other two cheaper packages are based on oral medicines and physiotherapy. Yang did not elaborate on how these two options worked.
The advertisement said it will follow the male to female ratio of 1:1, explaining that it will carry out its service for every two couples, with one couple wanting to have a boy baby and the other wanting a girl.
It said it will sign an agreement with clients and promises and a refund is guaranteed if the service fails.
Yang told the district Health Committee’s inspection officials that they will not identify the fetus’ gender, but will send pregnant women’s blood to other hospitals for check-ups. She added they have not sold the service to clients yet.
Officials told the hospital to take down the advertisement.
“You cannot promote this service. Of course, you definitely cannot do this service,” an official told Yang.
The incident comes against the backdrop of state authorities encouraging couples to have more children after recently allowing parents to have a third child as the country grapples with a shrinking birth rate and ageing population.
Many families wish to have two children of different genders, saying they can form a Chinese character hao (meaning good in English). The character has two parts: one is the Chinese character nv, which means female, and the other one zi meaning male.
Before Hong Kong closed its border to mainland tourists two years ago because of the coronavirus outbreak, some mainland families hired people to travel to the city to test the blood samples of expectant mothers since it is legal to identify a child’s gender there.
In February 2019, Luohu Customs in Shenzhen seized 28 blood samples a man was carrying in his pocket that he had taken across the border to Hong Kong for fetus’ sex identification.
