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China backtracks on eugenics law

The Chinese government has been forced to amend plans to introduce a ‘eugenics’ law to prevent the birth of children with genetic defects, after being stung by foreign criticism.

The original draft bill, titled ‘On Eugenics and Health Protection’, proposed using sterilisation, abortion and bans on marriage to prevent affected people from passing on hereditary mental disabilities and certain diseases, including hepatitis, to their children. Official sources claim that it was designed to ‘avoid new births of inferior quality and heighten the standards of the whole population.’

The government is redrafting the law and now says it will not coerce mothers into having abortions. However, the new version of the law would still make demands on some couples by requiring them to postpone marriage or take long-term contraceptive measures after marriage. This includes couples diagnosed as having reproductive diseases, hereditary diseases that lead to seriously sick or disabled children, schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychoses and other severe psychoses, or acute infectious diseases including venereal diseases.

The aim of the law will still be to prevent the birth of people with serious hereditary diseases or mental disabilities. The government claims that as many as 460,000 children a year are born in China with birth defects and disabilities that could be foreseen through genetic testing. Officials estimate that there are 10 million Chinese people with major congenital problems whose births could have been prevented if these measures had been introduced.

The move towards population screening and involuntary abortion follows widespread concern about the forceful implementation of China’s one-child-per-family policy. Although the government now stresses that termination of pregnancy must be with the agreement of the woman, fears remain that people will still be pushed into aborting foetuses diagnosed as carrying genetic defects.

In response to Western criticism the Chinese official news agency insisted: ‘The essence of China’s better-births policy is totally different from the racist ‘eugenics’ policy pursued by Adolf Hitler’ and instead aims to ‘improve the quality of the Chinese population. ’ Despite such protestations, the difference between China’s policy and the traditional eugenic goal of ‘improving the stock and eliminating defectives’ is hard to see.