They consider it a major effort by the government to safeguard and respect the freedom and rights of individual citizens.

After the widely-hailed move, the pre-marital physical check-up has rapidly declined in popularity since its mandatory status was lifted last October.

Media reports indicate the rate of voluntary compliance has been reduced by half or more in major cities such as Beijing and Shanghai and is approaching zero in smaller cities and rural areas.

Critics, most of them health and legal experts, say the grave consequence has borne out their concerns about the negative impact of abandoning the compulsory pre-marital physical check-up. They warn the emerging trend threatens to foil the government's effort to keep down the mortality and disability rates of newborns.

'For fear of choking'

Wu Yu, a researcher with the Shanghai Institute for Family Planning and Reproductive Technology Aid, says pre-marital physical check-ups are a very important step to ensure the health of newborn babies.

Pre-marital physical check-ups have proven effective and useful in preventing the transmission of infectious diseases such as Hepatitis B and tuberculosis and sexually-transmitted diseases like syphilis from parents to newborn babies, according to Wu.

She says 66 people out of every 10,000 who receive pre-marital physical check-ups are advised to postpone their marriage or not bear a child because of preclinical diseases.

The rate of birth defects among children of high-risk couples is nearly 60 per cent - eight times that of healthy parents, Wu says.

Each baby with birth defect costs the society an additional 25,000 yuan (US$3,022) annually.

Given such a grave situation, proponents stress the compulsory pre-marital check-up should not have been eliminated without a careful study and introduction of co-operative regulations.

"We cannot blame the compulsory pre-marital physical check-up system itself for all the problems arising during the process of implementing the system," says Professor Jiang Yue, a marriage law expert at Xiamen University. "Instead of eliminating the system in a hurried way, the government should have taken concrete steps to ensure better implementation of the system."

Most complaints about the procedure focused on malfeasant practices such as expanding the scope for check-up items and levying arbitrary fees.

All these problems could be effectively addressed through regulation and standardization, according to Jiang.

Some critics have gone so far as to describe elimination of the compulsory pre-marital physical check-up as "giving up eating for fear of choking."

Lack of communication

There was a lack of communication among related government departments before phasing out the programme, according to media commentator Feng Shaoyuan.

The Ministry of Civil Affairs went its own way in introducing the scheme in its new Regulation on Marriage Registration, but it failed to consider the potential contradiction of the move in relation to other laws and regulations.

For example, the Law on Mother and Baby Healthcare of the People's Republic of China clearly stipulates pre-marital physical check-ups must be conducted on young couples to ensure the health of their children.

Feng says the contradictory regulations enacted by different government bodies signals the absence of a co-ordinated mechanism among them.

"After all, it is the government that is duty-bound to promote better understanding of its policies and regulations to help dispel the public's confusion about contradictory messages," says Zheng Xiaochuan, a legal expert with the China University of Political Science and Law.

Bi Ke, another media commentator, attributes the low rate of voluntary pre-marital physical check-ups to the government's failure to introduce more active measures to co-operate its abandonment of the compulsory programme.

Given the public's poor awareness regarding the importance of pre-marital physical check-ups, the government should have forecast the impact of its decision and thus taken preventive measures to stave off negative consequences, Bi says.

He adds those measures should include long-term promotion through the media to encourage voluntary pre-marital physical check-ups, and government subsidies for low-income couples who cannot afford to pay for them.