Gu Jia/Shanghai Daily news
Over 200 young girls, aged from 13 to 18, have undergone abortions at the
People's Liberation Army No. 411 Hospital in the past two months, today's Youth
Daily reports.
All these girls are the target of a help-line set up by the
hospital which offers information and advice about unexpected pregnancies and
other reproductive issues.
Since July 8, the help-line has received over
1,500 calls from young women, with over a third of them seeking advice on
contraception, physical knowledge and abortion.
According to statistics from
the Hospital, the number of pregnant girls who have contacted the Hospital has
doubled over the past two months compared to the same period last year.
The
worry is that almost half of these young women take no account of the harm that
the operations can do to both their bodies and their minds.
Zhang Zhengrong,
vice-director physician at the Hospital, pointed out that it's bad social
attitudes that lead to "maiden mothers" seeing the solution as just being a
matter of undergoing "simple" surgery, and that the lack of sex education was
the principle cause of the problem.