Trong khi sưu tầm bản tin Phật Giáo, gặp được bản tin này nên xin mang về đây mời các anh chị em cùng đọc.HC With alarmingly high abortion rate, Vietnam seeks to educate youngThu Jul 7,11:06 AM ET
HANOI (AFP) - Sixteen-year-old Nguyen Thanh Binh and her father sob openly as they beg a doctor to perform an abortion on her, even though she is already in the 17th week of her pregnancy.
Binh, in a white shirt dotted with flower motifs and cheap Vietnamese jeans, emerges a few hours later from behind an operating room in Hanoi's Obstetrics Hospital, pale, tired, and eyes red from crying.
The classmate with whom Binh -- not her real name -- had been going out, abandoned her after learning of the pregnancy and she was forced to seek her widowed father's help to cope with her situation.
"I don't want to kill my grandchild, but what can I do? My daughter cannot become a mother when she is only 16," says Binh's disconsolate father.
Hers is among 22 abortions performed at the hospital that day. On average, the hospital conducts about 34 such operations each day, or nearly 12,000 a year.
Vietnam, with a population of 82 million, sees 1.4 million pregnancies terminated a year and is among the world's leading countries in terms of abortion rates, according to Vietnam Family Planning Association.
Lack of sex education, insufficient use of contraceptives and the pressure to terminate pregnancies in case of female foetuses in a society where families place greater value on male offspring are among the reasons for the phenomenon, experts say.
"How could I tell my daughter about sex? It's so sensitive," says Hoang Thi Mai, 35, an employee of a foreign company in Hanoi, referring to her daughter, who is 10 years old. "She would know about it anyway, when she grows up ... might be from friends, and from the mass media."
Trieu Phuong Khanh, a consultant at Hanoi's Obstetrics Hospital says: "People in Vietnam, especially the young, lack appropriate understanding on sex and gender issues as well as on family planning measures.
"Some are very naive, they even think a sperm from somewhere crawls into a body, making them pregnant" without having sexual intercourse. They then choose abortion as a solution, Khanh adds.
As in many pre-industrial societies with high infant mortality rates, Vietnamese people long believed that having lots of children would bring prosperity. Women paid little heed to reproductive health, trusting in divine intervention to see to their and their offsprings' welfare and it was even considered a sin to terminate a pregnancy.
Even today a few older people hold such views.
"I don't know why young people these days go in for abortion with such alacrity. Killing any living thing is a crime," says Tran Thi Ti, 78, a practising Buddhist, who has 11 children and 20 grandchildren.
-- Average youngster starts having sex at 14 --Times have changed since the 1980s, when Vietnam, emerging from the scars of a war with the United States and eyeing modernisation, adopted measures to check its population growth.
Although the family planning policy in Vietnam has never been as harsh as in China, which introduced a one-child policy, disincentives such as fines and salary freezes were placed in the way of those going in for a third child.
And with the use of contraceptives not having caught on yet in Vietnam despite campaigns to popularize them, abortions have been a major method of preventing child birth.
"I went through abortion twice in my life and the experience was terrible," says Nguyen Tuyet Lan, 52, a Hanoi housewife. "I had to give up the babies, as during that period, we were allowed to have only two children maximum," she says.
The traditional pressure in many Asian societies to have male offspring has added to the problem. Couples seek ways of finding out the gender of the foetus through ultrasound technology or such simple and unscientific methods as feeling the pulse of the pregnant woman. If the foetus is deemed female, it is often aborted.
In recent years, those opting for abortion are not only married people. A fourth of them are unmarried women under 18, according to official figures. In a country where a majority professes to be Buddhist, sexual intercourse before marriage is considered a taboo.
But a recent survey by the National Committee for Population, Family and Children in Hanoi and the southern economic capital Ho Chi Minh City, showed the average age people lose their virginity has fallen from 19 to 14.5 within just seven years.
"Physically, young people at present are developing very quickly. Therefore, their need for sex appears earlier than before," says Chu Thi Xuyen, deputy Chairwoman of Vietnam Family Planning Association.
However, experts say that while young people have access to a wide variety of information, they lack vital knowledge of sex education.
The problem causes economic losses too. Of the 235 women on the payroll of a five-star hotel in Vietnam, 20 took several days off last year having undergone abortions, the head of the establishment says, requesting anonymity.
His hotel has planned to start a sex education course with the help of a non-government organisation and introduce employees to contraceptives.
"There's a purely human side to the issue. I come from a country where we learn such things in school and I want to pass that on," he says.
"And there is the economic aspect: it's a human resource problem. The women have to be replaced. That affects the organisation and its productivity," he says, adding he was surprised to find the human resources people kept statistics on the phenomenon.
Xuyen of the Family Planning Association says: "There is no strategic and scientific orientation for sex and gender education in Vietnam. Young people are given insufficient information on the sensitive issue."
She and other experts call for a close cooperation between the government and social organisations in sex and gender education.
She deems it necessary to incorporate sex education in the official school curriculum, warning that otherwise, "lack of understanding on safe sex will help increase the abortion rate in the time to come".
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