QINGDAO, China — At an abortion clinic in this seaside city, a young woman sat in the recovery room with an IV drip in one hand and a cellphone in the other. She was 22 and worked as a nurse. Her boyfriend, an information technology specialist, sat nearby. They both knew the routine: It was her second abortion in 18 months.

In the waiting room, a few other unmarried couples watched a DVD of a hit Chinese movie until they were called. The clinic, one of the few in China that focuses on reproductive health for single women, performed 65 abortions in March. Of those women, 42 were having at least their second abortion. One woman had her sixth.

Young and single is not the usual profile of a woman having an abortion in China. Far more often, abortion has been associated with married women complying, voluntarily or not, with the country’s one-child policy. But as society has rapidly changed, so has the face of abortion.

Unmarried women, including teenagers, are now having a rising number of abortions, and even constitute a majority of cases in Shanghai and parts of Beijing, according to academic studies and health experts. And many of these women — migrant workers, urban professionals, students and prostitutes — are having multiple abortions.

“We can see it beginning in larger cities and the smaller cities, even down to the developing counties,” said Gu Baochang, a leading scholar on family planning policy at Renmin University in Beijing. “More and more abortions are for unmarried women. It is a very clear trend.”

For this new generation of single women, who have grown up in a China increasingly unmoored from the values, and inhibitions, of traditional culture, the rising abortion numbers are rooted in many factors. While the Chinese government has focused on policing the reproductive lives of married women, it has paid far less attention to educating single women about sex, partly because of cultural resistance.

Health experts say that many single women lack even a basic understanding about reproductive health and contraception. At the same time, premarital sex, once rare, is now considered common, particularly in urban areas. So as more single women are having sex, despite often knowing little about it, they also are having more abortions.

“There is a blind spot in sex education in China,” said Xu Jin, director of the clinic, which is run by Marie Stopes International, a nonprofit group that provides sexual and reproductive information and services. “We are here to fill the hole in the system.”

Public hospitals, which are found across China, are the busiest abortion providers. Prices vary, depending on location. Ms. Xu said abortions at public hospitals in cities like Beijing might average 500 yuan, or about $65. These hospitals are usually impersonal and crowded, and some operating rooms are equipped to perform more than one abortion at once.

Health experts in China say safety is usually not a problem. However, Ms. Xu noted that young women who have multiple abortions are more susceptible to certain health problems, including infertility. A recent survey of 8,846 single and married women who had undergone abortions at 10 hospitals in Beijing found that 36 percent had had more than one abortion within six months.

For single women, confidentiality is a major concern. A single, pregnant woman faces enormous social stigma and shame and has few options beyond abortion. Single motherhood is almost nonexistent, and unmarried pregnant women rarely carry a pregnancy to term in order to place a child up for adoption.

Profiteering private hospitals and clinics, some nicknamed “quack” hospitals, are now marketing abortion services, as well as treatment for sexually transmitted diseases. These hospitals advertise heavily with promises of strict confidentiality. But sensational, even fraudulent, advertising has become so rampant — “Painless Abortions!” or “The Model Abortion for a New Generation!” — that last November the government banned advertisements for abortion and 11 other types of medical treatment. Still, the ads continue to surface in some newspapers. And private clinics distribute fliers on university campuses, even offering student discounts.

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