Paul Responds to Recent Article on Abortion

Paul Steele has contributed several stories to AHCB, including the popular China Quarantine Blog. He has also published essays in Japanese dealing with issues of sexual violence in Japanese culture. Below he responds to my recent essay [How] America is Exacerbating China’s Abortion Problems.

Damjan,

I thought your most recent article was well well written.   My comments are too long by themselves so let me see if I can break them up and post them in succession:

Blood libel is indeed a powerful, common, emotive and historically potent technique of slander against other races and culture.  Recently I have also heard baby and fetus eating rumors propagated against the Chinese by the Vietnamese.  I have also hears the Chinese use it themselves against the Japanese.  It certainly gives a younger generation, unexposed to direct conflicts or prejudices of the past, reason to prolong a tradition of hatred.

Thoughts on sexual health in China:

Sex education is important and well needed.  My first instinct with relation to China’s high abortion rate was to blame rampant prostitution, and the coercion and enslavement that always accompanies that industry.  The image my local acquaintances carry however, is that unwed college students are just as likely to have multiple procedures, and that public education in this regard is abhorrently inadequate.  If this is true it is a shame.  The psychological and physical trauma resulting from abortion is well documented.  Chinese policy obviously encourages the availability of birth control.  It is difficult to believe that a nation that had students marching for hours a week for over a month in preparation for the 60th anniversary of the CCP cant get those same students to protect themselves and their partners from obvious clinical risk.

The most powerfully common issue of sexual health in China is the need for a less clinical education.  One that embraces sexual acts as safe expressions of intimacy between partners for mutual fulfillment and yes, recreation: A healthy psychological approach far beyond chauvinistic designs of baby making and marital “duty.”  When we talk about the Cultural Revolution in China it is easy to focus on professors in prisons and intellectuals on work farms, but a lot of romance died for men and women from that time period as well, and China’s youth is only beginning to see that blossom break through the snow again.  This progress is naturally slow, as advice and ideals from older generations can be limited or counter productive.  But these issues are directly rooted to the clinical ones that receive so much more attention from government programs.

The tragedies and problems of a utilitarian, exclusively straight, male dominated sexual culture extend directly into the structures and institutions of any society.  A states’ ability to address the source of these issues is questionable so perhaps there is no choice but generational progress.  I am not aware of public policy that can encourage men and women to explore and respect their partners and themselves as sexual beings, but perhaps in a nation where the state has the influence of a religion, it is possible.  I have long believed that a populous able to embrace the joys of sexuality regardless of gender is well on the way to enhanced overall clinical and psychological health.