16 million Chinese women married to gays

At least 16 million women in China are married to gays, a leading expert has said.

Professor Zhang Bei-chuan of Qingdao University, an authority on AIDS and HIV, said that due to traditional family values in China, about 90 percent of homosexual men get married because of pressure to conform.

"But their wives are struggling to cope and their plight should be recognized," The China Daily quoted him, as saying.

Xiao Yao, a 29-year-old magazine editor in Xi’an, Shaanxi province, divorced her gay husband in 2008.

"Most gay men’s wives I’ve known are silently suffering at the hands of husbands who could never love them, and like me, some even got abused by husbands who were also under great pressure," she said.

Xiao now runs a website called "Homeland of gays’ wives", which has 1,200 registered users and provides support and advice.

Zhang said that getting their voice heard was the first step to raising public awareness.

However, some within the gay community think otherwise.

Xiao Dong, a 36-year-old gay man, who heads a civil organization in HIV/AIDS prevention and control, said: "Zhang’s estimation is unsubstantiated and I even feel it’s pointless to research the issue."

Abortion: Worldwide Rate Stopped Falling After 2003

The world’s abortion rate, which began declining steadily in the 1990s, has stopped falling, according to a new study.

The study, published online last week in The Lancet, was done by the World Health Organization and the Guttmacher Institute in New York, which studies sexuality and reproductive health.

Globally, abortions fell from 35 per 1,000 women in 1995 to 29 per 1,000 by 2003. After that, the rate essentially leveled off.

The study blamed a decline in access to birth control.

“When contraception rates are high, abortion rates are low,” Gilda Sedgh, a senior research associate at the institute and the lead author of the new study, said in an interview.

Birth control may have declined as the fight against AIDS, malaria and other diseases diverted dollars from it, she added.

The United States is the biggest donor toward birth control in poor countries, but those funds leveled off as the Bush administration poured money into AIDS drugs, mosquito nets and other health measures.

European donors “tried to fill the void but couldn’t,” Dr. Sedgh said.

Paradoxically, countries where abortion is illegal often have more abortions, the study found. For example, abortion rates are far higher in Africa and Latin America — where abortions are illegal or heavily restricted — than in the United States and Western Europe.

But in South Africa, where they are legal, the abortion rate is the continent’s lowest. After South Africa liberalized its abortion law in 1997, Dr. Sedgh said, maternal deaths from unsafe abortions fell by 90 percent.