Alibaba removes ad claiming to help people 'give birth to boys'

Chinese Internet giant company Alibaba has apologized and taken down a controversial advertisement on a nutrient supplement that claims to help women increase their chance of having a boy.

The ad implied that its product could sort of control the baby's gender, which has enraged Chinese netizens after it appeared on the top page of China’s largest online shopping platform Taobao.

Fertility Professor Liang Yuanjiao at Zhongda Hospital of Southeast University in east China’s Nanjing City told Yangtze Evening News that there is no scientific proof the product would be able to control the outcome of the baby's gender by taking any medicine or food. 

At the same time, lawyer Han Xiao with Beijing Kangda Law Firm said China’s Constitution states that everyone is equal, so the ad is illegal, adding that the shop is facing an administrative penalty for misleading consumers.

Alibaba has since removed the ad, punished the store and admitted that they had made a gender discriminatory mistake due to “negligence of a review”, and promised to tighten its ad filtering functions in the future. 

However, Internet users are not satisfied with the explanation.

On China’s leading social media platform Weibo, user @junhe said “It’s incredibly shocking. It’s the 21st century, where fetus gender identification is banned, and such products can still be openly sold. ”

Weibo user @guolaoshi said “why did you punish the store? You allowed it to be published.”

And @malamaosi commented “Is it useful to remove just one single ad? Such products are still on sale. When there is a demand, there is a market. The parents who only want baby boys are disgusting. ” 

Historically, Chinese people used to prefer boys over girls for farming reasons however this reason still exists in some areas today.

A normal sex ratio at birth in China commonly ranges between 103 and 107 baby boys for every 100 girls. However, China’s sexual disparity has been more than 110 for a long time partly due to sex-selective abortions, according to the National Health Commission.

The good news is that thanks to the introduction of the "second-child policy", China's gender imbalance has reduced in the past five years, according to Xinhua.