Strict campaign to rectify sex imbalance

BEIJING - As China's population becomes more dominated by males, authorities have begun a national campaign to crack down on procedures used to determine a fetus' sex for anything other than medical purposes and abortions performed because a fetus is of a certain sex.

The campaign is being undertaken by the National Population and Family Planning Commission, the Ministry of Health, the State Food and Drug Administration, the Ministry of Public Security and other government agencies. It will last until March 2012 on the mainland, Li Bin, minister of the family planning commission, said at a national teleconference on Tuesday.

The campaign will give the public a sense of the importance of having a balance between the numbers of males and females in the population. It will also severely punish those who help to determine the sex of a fetus for something other than a medical purpose or to perform sex-selective abortions, and will ensure that more is done to monitor for those acts.