Illegal births and legal abortions – the case of China

BACKGROUND: China has a national policy regulating the number of children that a woman is allowed to have. The central concept at the individual level application is "illegal pregnancy". The purpose of this article is to describe and problematicize the concept of illegal pregnancy and its use in practice. METHODS: Original texts and previous published and unpublished reports and statistics were used. RESULTS: By 1979 the Chinese population policy was clearly a policy of controlling population growth. For a pregnancy to be legal, it has to be defined as such according to the family-level eligibility rules, and in some places it has to be within the local quota. Enforcement of the policy has been pursued via the State Family Planning (FP) Commission and the Communist Party (CP), both of which have a functioning vertical structure down to the lowest administrative units. There are various incentives and disincentives for families to follow the policy. An extensive system has been created to keep the contraceptive use and pregnancy status of all married women at reproductive age under constant surveillance. In the early 1990s FP and CP officials were made personally responsible for meeting population targets. Since 1979, abortion has been available on request, and the ratio of legal abortions to birth increased in the 1980s and declined in the 1990s. Similar to what happens in other Asian countries with low fertility rates and higher esteem for boys, both national- and local-level data show that an unnaturally greater number of boys than girls are registered as having been born. CONCLUSION: Defining a pregnancy as "illegal" and carrying out the surveillance of individual women are phenomena unique in China, but this does not apply to other features of the policy. The moral judgment concerning the policy depends on the basic question of whether reproduction should be considered as an individual or social decision

Evaluation of Pax6 Mutant Rat as a Model for Autism

Autism is a highly variable brain developmental disorder and has a strong genetic basis. Pax6 is a pivotal player in brain development and maintenance. It is expressed in embryonic and adult neural stem cells, in astrocytes in the entire central nervous system, and in neurons in the olfactory bulb, amygdala, thalamus, and cerebellum, functioning in highly context-dependent manners. We have recently reported that Pax6 heterozygous mutant (rSey2/+) rats with a spontaneous mutation in the Pax6 gene, show impaired prepulse inhibition (PPI). In the present study, we further examined behaviors of rSey2/+ rats and revealed that they exhibited abnormality in social interaction (more aggression and withdrawal) in addition to impairment in rearing activity and in fear-conditioned memory. Ultrasonic vocalization (USV) in rSey2+ rat pups was normal in male but abnormal in female. Moreover, treatment with clozapine successfully recovered the defects in sensorimotor gating function, but not in fear-conditioned memory. Taken together with our prior human genetic data and results in other literatures, rSey2/+ rats likely have some phenotypic components of autism

Personal spiritual values and quality of life: Evidence from Chinese college students

Values are guiding principles in our life. While some studies found spiritual values to be “healthier”, Sagiv and Schwartz (2000) showed that people holding non-spiritual values were higher on affective well-being. We examined the predictive power of these two types of values with a longitudinal dataset collected from Chinese students in Hong Kong. Structural equation modeling revealed that spiritual values (as well as family income) positively predicted quality of life a year later. Non-spiritual, self-enhancement values, did not show any association. Results suggest that developing spiritual values may promote well-being through enabling individuals to find meaning and purpose in life