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China: Drug bid to skirt family planning
(AP)
Updated: 2006-02-14 10:01
More Chinese women are exploiting easy access to fertility treatments to
skirt China's one-child limit, leading to a boom in numbers of multiple births,
an official newspaper reported Monday.
The number of multiple births in China
annually may have doubled due to easy access to fertility drugs.
[AP] | The main pediatric hospital in the eastern
city of Nanjing recorded 90 births of twins or triplets last year, up from an
average of 20 in past years, the China Daily said.
While many women underwent fertility treatment because they could not
conceive, others -- especially among the urban upper class and in conservative
rural areas -- did so specifically to get more babies per birth, the report
said.
In the late 1970s China began limiting most couples to one child, harshly
punishing violators in the hope of limiting its ballooning population, which now
stands at 1.3 billion.
Although the number of exceptions has broadened in recent years, the limits
remain, despite fears that the working age population is shrinking.
While no exact figures were available, previous media reports said the number
of twins born annually has doubled nationwide. There are no penalties for
multiple births.
Fueling the trend is the accessibility of imported fertility drugs in clinics
and pharmacies.
Although the Health Ministry banned their use by healthy women in 2005,
enforcement was virtually nonexistent, China Daily said.
The only way to control the sale was by forcing chemists to ask for
prescriptions before selling the drugs, an unnamed Nanjing municipal Health
Department official told the newspaper.
The phenomenon of taking fertility drugs specifically to
produce twins is not limited to China alone. 
British doctors say around 10 percent of women seeking fertility treatment
specifically ask for twins.
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