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Fourteen people were rounded up for allegedly offering an illegal service-that of determining the gender of unborn babies, police said yesterday.
The group is said to have been secretly operating; getting blood samples from pregnant women living in China Mainland and sending the samples to Hong Kong for tests to determine the sex of the fetus.
In China, rural couples have a strong preference for male offspring while couples in the urban centers who qualify to have a second child often prefer to have a son and daughter.
Sex determination tests had been banned in China since 1994 to put an end to sex-selective abortions. These tests however remain legal in Hong Kong.
This situation has given rise to the proliferation of illegal operations of agents or middlemen who offer the sex determination service to pregnant women In China Mainland.
These agents usually work with doctors from private clinics in China Mainland who do the extraction of blood samples which are then sent to Hong Kong.
Of the 14 suspects held by the police, one is a doctor aged 35 and surnamed Chen, who is connected with a private clinic in Wenzhou City in Zhejang Province.
In 2013, Chen was allegedly involved in the sex determination scheme that charged pregnant women anywhere from 5,800 yuan (US$928) to 7,500 yuan for the test.
The blood samples were transported by land on long-distance coaches to Shenzhen in China's southern province of Gungdong which is near Hong Kong.
Chen was supposedly guaranteed to receive between 500 to 800 yuan per patient, and illegal agents getting a portion of the fees too.
Chen together with two other suspects were said to have earned almost 200,000 yuan from the illegal service they offered to around 300 pregnant women from Wenzhou.
Some of these women had resorted to abortion of the babies in their wombs after getting a confirmation that their babies were girls, according to the police.
