I was talking with a guy who works ER. It turns out he was talking to a doctor from Vietnam who told him that it was reasonably common in China and Vietnam for husband to be castrated when the family reached final size so that he did not wander.

Anybody heard anything about that?

There were reports that China tried to enforce strict laws concerning the number of children any couple could have. If they exceeded the number (and I think it was one child per couple) then the man was forcibly sterilised - don't know if it was a castration or vasectomy.

I have heard of the one child rule in china before,but as to what happend to those who had more than one i dont know,maybe that is something we should think of in the west.

Free castration for those who have more than one child,well i would be due a free castration as i have three children.

After spending some time googling various combinations of China, castration, birth control, population control, and one child policy, with no results, I strongly suspect that somewhere along the path from Chinese to Vietnamese to English, someone mistranslated vasectomy as castration. a not uncommon mistake. If the Chinese were castrating men for birth control, I think the China haters would be trumpeting the fact vigorously.

Transward

transward (imported) wrote: Mon Jan 03, 2011 12:25 pm I strongly suspect that somewhere along the path from Chinese to Vietnamese to English, someone mistranslated vasectomy as castration. a not uncommon mistake.

It's a fairly common error. Gary Taylor's book Castration is rife with it. He became interested in castration after his own vasectomy. In fact, the opening paragraph of his book begins with the misconception:

"My boyfriend's been fixed." This defiant boast – spoken by a twenty-nine-year-old woman at a Christmas party in New York near the end fo a millennium – equates a sterilized man with a castrated animal.

The misconception is revisited many times in the book.

Both China and Vietnam have used vasectomy (sometimes compulsory ones in China) as a regular means of birth control.

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