Beijing, Dec. 20 (Reuters): China will unveil new rules this week aimed at restricting the number of foreigners who can adopt Chinese children, an official said today, which foreign agencies say will ban the obese and unmarried from adopting.

Prospective parents who take anti-depressants will also be barred, as will the disabled, according to the websites of foreign adoption agencies.

China has become a popular destination in recent years for couples, especially Americans, wishing to adopt.

Girls account for the vast majority of adoptions because of a traditional Chinese preference for boys, and because China’s strict controls on family size results in many female babies being abandoned at birth.

“The number of people applying for adoptions is soaring, but following the development of China’s economy and society the, number of abandoned and orphaned children is less and less,” said an official at the government’s China Centre of Adoption Affairs.

He denied that the new rules were partly designed to stop gay couples from adopting Chinese babies. China now allows unmarried people to adopt but officially bans adoptions by homosexuals, at least domestically.

“We hope that these children can grow up in even better conditions which benefit their healthy growth and so we are putting in place stricter conditions,” said the official, who declined to give his name.

“We had a meeting with representatives of the adoption agencies last week and explained the gist of the new rules to them,” he added, without detailing the new rules, but he warned that reports on overseas agencies’ websites may not be accurate. “We will issue a formal notice to those agencies in countries with which we have cooperative agreements, probably within the week,” the official said.

“They need somehow to cut down on the number of families that are submitting” adoption requests, said Jackie Harrah, executive director of Harrah’s Adoption International Mission in Spring, Texas.