Why China Won’t Allow Single Women to Freeze Their Eggs
Last week, Xu Zaozao, also referred to as Teresa Xu, acquired the final verdict for a lawsuit she filed in 2019 towards an obstetrics hospital that denied her entry to egg-freezing providers. Rejecting Xu’s third enchantment on Aug. 7, the Third Intermediate Folks’s Court docket in Beijing sided with the hospital, saying it didn’t violate her rights by doing so. For the claimant, the end result of a six-year battle for reproductive rights got here as no shock. “I was mentally prepared for it,” she mentioned in a dwell stream on her social media account. “This result wasn’t all that unexpected.”
The 36-year-old ladies’s rights activist and author first approached the hospital to freeze her eggs in 2018 after she broke up along with her then-boyfriend, spurred by the conclusion that regardless of being single and never wanting to put her profession on maintain, she needed to have youngsters sometime. As a substitute, docs urged Xu to marry and get pregnant sooner reasonably than later, as Chinese language legislation permits solely married {couples} to endure the process of egg freezing. She determined to problem the boundaries of fertility remedies in China within the first authorized case of its sort. “It feels like my right to choose is always controlled by others,” she told reporters on the time.
Within the early 2000s, the nation’s Nationwide Well being Fee issued guidelines that might permit single males to freeze their sperm. But, the legislation excludes single ladies from exercising the identical rights. Although the court docket has now handed a call that goes firmly towards Xu’s needs, the case has sparked a heated debate over gender equality within the nation, with rights activists arguing that an amazing patriarchal tradition in China excludes single ladies from exercising alternative of their reproductive journey.
“From a societal perspective, single women do not conform to traditional family values,” says Li Maizi, a famend Chinese language activist and campaigner for gender equality. “But as the first person in China to dare to challenge this unreasonable policy, Xu Zaozao has successfully brought the issue of egg freezing and assisted reproduction for single women into the public eye, making it an unavoidable social issue.”
Declining birthrates spur inhabitants disaster
The court docket’s choice comes at a time when China faces an pressing inhabitants disaster attributable to ageing and traditionally low fertility charges. Final yr, the nation’s inhabitants shrank—a primary since 1961—because the fertility charge fell below 1.2 per girl, under the speed of two.1 wanted to maintain a inhabitants secure, according to UN knowledge. Concurrently, the variety of Chinese language households with only one particular person increased from 8.3% in 2000 to 25.4% in 2020. And whereas conventional, nuclear households stay the norm, extra younger ladies have begun delaying getting married and having youngsters, together with these in relationships. The variety of registered marriages in China through the first half of this yr dropped to the bottom stage in a decade.
These developments are widespread in different East Asian nations, too: the mixed populations of China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan will shrink by 28% between 2020 and 2075, according to the U.N.
Learn Extra: Why Women in Asia Are Having Fewer Infants
In China, the ruling Communist Get together has had a say over household planning for years, although officers have step by step loosened guidelines across the one-child coverage by permitting households to have two youngsters by 2016, after which three by 2021. To reply to the inhabitants disaster, President Xi Jinping pledged “a national policy system to boost birth rates” in 2022. Beijing has since supplied incentives to encourage married {couples} to have extra youngsters that vary from money handouts, tax cuts, and property concessions, to making in vitro fertilization and different reproductive providers extra extensively reasonably priced.
These measures replicate how marriage is established as a gateway to youngsters in China, says Melanie Meng Xue, a professor on the London College of Economics and Political Science. “Aside from viewing children as the property of the husband’s family, rather than something women might desire from themselves, the Chinese Communist Party has reinforced this perspective by implementing policies that make marriage a prerequisite for obtaining a permit to give birth,” says Xue. She provides that with out this allow, mother and father can not formally register their baby.
In gentle of those restrictions, single mom communities have united to combat for his or her rights for years by asking for “maternity allowances” and “maternity insurance coverage”—compensation given to moms for missed work revenue whereas pregnant. In 2021 Zhāng Méng, a single mom from Shanghai, successfully secured maternity insurance coverage after battling the courts for 4 years.
Officers nonetheless justify the ban on single women from freezing their eggs by pointing to the health risks involved with women giving birth at an older age. Experts have pushed back by mentioning that the process—which requires hormone injections and an egg retrieval process that takes place below anesthesia—is identical for single and married ladies. Furthermore, a 2015 peer-reviewed article by Sun Xiaoxi, the deputy director of the Genetics & IVF Institute at Fudan University’s Obstetrics & Gynecology Hospital, stated the risks associated with egg freezing were “small probability events.”
Read More: Can China’s Baby Bust Be Reversed? Don’t Count On It
Single women turn to other options
Given the restrictions, single Chinese women have instead turned elsewhere to seek the expensive procedure. In 2015, Chinese film star Xu Jinglei caused a stir when she revealed that she had undertaken an egg-freezing procedure in the U.S. two years earlier. Travel companies have also begun catering to these needs, with websites like Ctrip.com offering a seven-day tour of California that features classes at a clinic for egg freezing.
Li says that while the U.S. remains a popular destination to undergo the procedure, women have also sought services in Southeast Asian countries like Thailand and underground IVF clinics in China. “The enormous reproductive demand from non-mainstream groups has stimulated the market, giving rise to many gray industries,” she says.
But for the majority of Chinese women wishing to access these services abroad, the high cost remains prohibitive. “I would’ve done it already if I could afford it,” one Guangzhou government office worker in her early 30s told CNN.
It will take a while before Chinese society can widely accept the use of IVF technology to allow women more reproductive options, Xue at LSE says, but Teresa Xu’s case has nevertheless highlighted the growing awareness among younger Chinese women of their reproductive rights, or lack thereof, as well as their desire to have children at a time of their choosing.
“The current legal and social frameworks need to evolve in ways that are meaningful for women’s autonomy and rights,” she continues, “but even in a society that is not traditionally rights-based, it is not impossible to see policy changes occur.”
Even Xu, the claimant, famous the constructive language within the court docket judgment regardless of the decision throughout her dwell stream: “As our country’s policy on births is adjusted, relevant medical and health laws, regulations, diagnosis and treatment standards, and medical ethics standards may also change accordingly.”