On the afternoon of August 8, a Hong Kong man was caught at the Luohu border checkpoint trying to bring five tubes of blood from Shenzhen into Hong Kong, according to cngold.com.cn.
But why? Was it for personal use? Was he brushing his teeth with it? Is cross-border blood the new drink Hong Kong clubbers can’t get enough of? No! The blood was from five pregnant mainland women who want to know the gender of the fetus they are carrying.
The tests are illegal on the mainland because they can lead to sex selective abortions, worsening a male-to-female imbalance that Chinese authorities describe as the worst in the world.
Reports of people trying to get blood samples into Hong Kong crop up every few months, suggesting an established industry.
From a small blood sample a fetuses gender can be revealed.
A Google search in simplified Chinese for ‘fetus sex identification’ is met with a results page sporting a paid advertisement by baby-dna.com offering the service for HKD4,500. The baby-dna.com website is in simplified Chinese and lists an active WeChat account that identifies a Hong Kong business called the Hong Kong Prenatal Consultancy.
The mother load of cases may have been at the beginning of the crackdown on cross-border blood tests in 2014 when a woman was caught with 96 blood samples.
Traditionally, Chinese families have preferred boys – they carry on the family name, can till fields with great strength and bring a wife into the home to help care for aging parents – and the one child policy has led to sex selective abortions.
There were 120 male births for every 100 female births from 2005 to 2010, according to a study by the Australian National University.
The cngold.com.cn article notes that not only is it ‘extremely illegal’ to smuggle blood into Hong Kong, a blood test to determine a fetus's gender isn’t 100 percent accurate. Actually, the test is 99.5 percent accurate, according to Great Britain’s National Health Service.
The article ends with a rather strange warning that sending blood to Hong Kong may give foreign institutions the chance to study Chinese DNA with results “too dreadful to contemplate!”
Clearly the only source for Chinese DNA abroad would have to go through the Hong Kong border, unless you count the more than 3.9 million ethnically Chinese people who were living in the United States as of 2014, according to the United States Census Bureau.
[Images via Wikimediacommons.org]
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