A National Taiwan University Hospital obstetrician jokingly announced on Thursday that he will stop offering his services to mothers expecting boys, after he was recently called in for questioning by the Bureau of Health Promotion for delivering more boys than girls.
Shih Jin-chung (施景中) made the comment in a post on his Facebook page titled “Hail to the Bureau of Health Promotion (偉哉國健局),” in which he said that “to avoid causing the government more trouble” he will no longer deliver boys and will halt all services to pregnant women carrying boys.
Shih delivered 63 newborn boys and 40 girls from January to March. When asked to comment on the statistically unbalanced figures, Shih said he was an obstetrician who delivers babies, not a physician who specializes in selective reproduction.
“Women come to me when they are already pregnant. There is absolutely no way that I could change the gender of their fetuses. Today, increasingly fewer doctors are choosing to go into gynecology, and the bureau is exacerbating this with its gender balance policy,” he said.
Shih said that, from an evolutionary perspective, men are meant to outnumber women because they are more susceptible to more causes of death.
Shih added that the drop in the nation’s ratio of newborn boys to girls last year was a natural fluctuation, not the result of the bureau’s efforts to create gender balance.
“The bureau has called in obstetricians who deliver more boys than girls for questioning under the pretext of showing its ‘concern’ for them,” Shih said. “However, one of these obstetricians was asked to write a report on how to improve the disproportionate sex ratio among the newborns he delivered. Is this what the bureau calls ‘concern?’”
Obstetrician Lee Maw-sheng (李茂盛) said the bureau seemed to be wasting government resources by pursuing the policy, citing as an example an obstetrician who was questioned by a local health department for delivering only one boy within a month — which put his boy-girl ratio at 1:0.
“The sex ratio varies from doctor to doctor and from month to month, there really is no explanation for it,” Lee said, adding that the bureau’s handling of the matter was an insult to obstetricians and could make it an international laughingstock.
Taiwan Association of Obstetrics and Gynecology secretary-general Huang Ming-chao (黃閔照) said the association had received complaints from several obstetricians over the matter and that the bureau’s manner of handling the issue like police clamping down on drunk driving was unacceptable.
In response, Bureau of Health Promotion deputy director Kung Hsien-lan (孔憲蘭) said the bureau was not interrogating obstetricians whose boy-girl ratios were higher than the average ratio of 1.06 to 1, just showing its concern.
“The bureau is only trying to facilitate communication with doctors so concerted efforts can be made to balance the sex ratio among newborns,” Kung said.
The bureau said that the unbalance seen in Taiwan is also present in many other Asian countries and has become a subject of domestic and international concern.
According to the bureau, the Department of Health set up a team in 2010 to study the newborn sex ratio. The team established a system to receive reports from medical facilities and obstetricians on new births. It then analyzes the data and initiates investigations of the facility if the ratio it reports is “clearly abnormal.”
The team also roots out illegal advertisements on “boy-for-sure” pregnancy measures or gender selection.
The joint efforts of various parties has brought the ratio down from 1.090 in 2010 to 1.074 last year, though this is still higher than the natural 1.06 ratio, the bureau said.
While the department’s monitoring of medical facilities is not an accusation that the facilities are guilty of any wrongdoing, the 1.08 male-female ratio among newborns in the period between January and last month is higher than the 1.076 recorded in the same period last year, which indicates that there has been an increase in the use of technology-aided gender selection, the bureau said.
An increase in Taiwanese boats using China-made automatic identification systems (AIS) could confuse coast guards patrolling waters off Taiwan’s southwest coast and become a loophole in the national security system, sources familiar with the matter said yesterday. Taiwan ADIZ, a Facebook page created by enthusiasts who monitor Chinese military activities in airspace and waters off Taiwan’s southwest coast, on Saturday identified what seemed to be a Chinese cargo container ship near Penghu County. The Coast Guard Administration went to the location after receiving the tip and found that it was a Taiwanese yacht, which had a Chinese AIS installed. Similar instances had also
GOOD DIPLOMACY: The KMT has maintained close contact with representative offices in Taiwan and had extended an invitation to Russia as well, the KMT said The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) would “appropriately handle” the fallout from an invitation it had extended to Russia’s representative to Taipei to attend its international banquet last month, KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) said yesterday. US and EU representatives in Taiwan boycotted the event, and only later agreed to attend after the KMT rescinded its invitation to the Russian representative. The KMT has maintained long-term close contact with all representative offices and embassies in Taiwan, and had extended the invitation as a practice of good diplomacy, Chu said. “Some EU countries have expressed their opinions of Russia, and the KMT respects that,” he
AMENDMENT: Contact with certain individuals in China, Hong Kong and Macau must be reported, and failure to comply could result in a prison sentence, the proposal stated The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) yesterday voted against a proposed bill by Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers that would require elected officials to seek approval before visiting China. DPP Legislator Puma Shen’s (沈伯洋) proposed amendments to the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), stipulate that contact with certain individuals in China, Hong Kong and Macau should be reported, while failure to comply would be punishable by prison sentences of up to three years, alongside a fine of NT$10 million (US$309,041). Fifty-six voted with the TPP in opposition
VIGILANCE: The military is paying close attention to actions that might damage peace and stability in the region, the deputy minister of national defense said The People’s Republic of China (PRC) might consider initiating a hack on Taiwanese networks on May 20, the day of the inauguration ceremony of president-elect William Lai (賴清德), sources familiar with cross-strait issues said. While US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s statement of the US expectation “that all sides will conduct themselves with restraint and prudence in the period ahead” would prevent military actions by China, Beijing could still try to sabotage Taiwan’s inauguration ceremony, the source said. China might gain access to the video screens outside of the Presidential Office Building and display embarrassing messages from Beijing, such as congratulating Lai