NOTE: All information is what have found out from my own personal experience. It is by no means a definitive look at contraceptive use in China.
One of the things
that China is best known for in the West is it's radical one-child
policy. In the 1970's, with a surging population and stretched
resources, China introduced a policy that meant family size was
limited and most families could only have one child. The policy has
seemingly worked and some estimate that over 200 million births have
been prevented since the policy was first introduced, to put that
into perspective that's somewhere around the number of people living
in Brazil. China is still the most populous country in the world but
it seems like the government was doing something right when it came
to slowing the birth rate.
With such a
wide-spread family planning policy one would imagine that China has
sophisticated range contraception available to it's people. But as I,
and many before me, have found out this is not the case. Sure there
are condoms available everywhere, boxes and boxes of them line the
tills at pretty much every shop and they have more brands and 'types'
that I could ever imagine anyone ever needed. But, past condoms,
contraception gets a bit sketchier.
In the UK we are
blessed with a huge array of contraceptive options and we are taught
about them all in school, so I like to feel we are fairly educated on
the matter. In China sex is still a bit of a taboo and the idea of
sex ed being taught in schools would be completely unacceptable to
many Chinese. Students are forbidden to have boyfriends or
girlfriends — like a forbidding ever stopped anyone doing anything,
especially teenagers – and sex outside of marriage is still frowned
upon in many circles, although this is getting more acceptable
throughout the country. This means that most grown women know very
little about contraception in general. Very few have heard of the
pill (except in the morning after capacity) and most female Chinese
friends I asked got very coy and sort of refused to speak about it.
It seems like contraception is also a pretty big taboo.
So when personal
connections failed I took to the internet to see what information I
could find. What I found was part baffling and part shocking, and yet
I can't really verify too much of it because no one will talk to me
about it!
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| "Carry out birth planning for the revolution" |
First thing I found
was that many foreigners in China before me had been down this road
and struggled to find any information, but that there was information
out there to be found! One might assume that with the prevalence of
condoms they are one of the most common methods of contraception in
China, but that apparently isn't the case. There are other methods
which prefered and which are much stranger to us.
One is something
that can best be described as the grandmother of the IUD, it's a sort
of metal ring that is inserted by a doctor and remains there until it
is removed. The problem is that it's ancient technology and has a
worryingly high failure rate, not something you want from a
contraception. This kind of IUD is becoming less widely used and the
modern IUD that we know in the West is more common, but the high
failure rate of the “Chinese IUD” would become a theme for
Chinese contraception. But, the Chinese IUD is probably one of the
less alarming contraception methods to us in the West.
Many Chinese people
follow the protocol of “pulling out”, something that we are all
taught will definitely not stop pregnancy. Many also use a “periodic
abstinence” approach which uses some calculation around the
menstrual cycle to find the “safe” time to have sex with no
contraception. That idea just scares me, it seems so ineffective that
it doesn't surprise me that abortion is so common here.
The last method I
want to mention is sterilization, China has an extremely high
sterilization rate and this is in part due to the one-child policy.
Once families have had all the children they are permitted
sterilization is a relatively cheap and effective method of
contraception. A common slogan of the one-child policy was
“if you have one child, IUD please, if you have two children, sterilization please”.
But to me this seems slightly barbaric when other effective options
are available, I've heard stories of forced sterilization and
worryingly I've even heard stories of the government taking replacing
the contraceptive pill with pills that will sterilize you –
although I can't say how true this really is! This kind of horror
story is one of the things that worries me the most now that I am on
Marvelon, a contraceptive pill from a Chinese pharmacy, and while
I've researched as much as I can and
it is a brand that is used outside China there's always that nagging
feeling of not really knowing
what you're buying. For now it seems fine and I guess only time will
tell any side effects, but my
mission to find it has shown me a fair deal about attitudes towards
sex and contraception.
China
may have come a long way since the early days of the one-child policy
(it has since been relaxed to include many exceptions, such as if one
parent is an only child a couple can have two children) but they
haven't really come a long way with their understanding and use of
contraception. The conservative attitudes of the government filter
down to the people and there is a lack of education around the
massive number of options that are available. Methods of
contraception that are most popular in other parts of the world are
ignored for more drastic options (like sterilization), or for less
reliable options (like pulling out and periodic abstinence); and
those that are most reliable, like the pill, are considered unhealthy
in the face of ignorance about them.
To
me it is strange how a country with such a strict family planning
policy can have such narrow views of contraception, but attitudes are
slowly changing. Perhaps over time people will learn more about the
options available to them and drastic measures won't have to be used
quite so often.
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