China wants more babies, its women don’t as Xi regime gets increasingly intrusive

Faced with a shrinking population that threatens economic growth, the Chinese government is employing a tried-and-true strategy: inserting itself into one of women’s most intimate decisions, whether or not to have a child.

During a national meeting of parliamentarians in Beijing this year, Gao Jie, a delegate from the All-China Women’s Federation, told reporters, “As a woman, I always feel, if you’ve done your time on this earth and haven’t given birth to another life, that’s a real pity.”

Authorities are not merely knocking on women’s doors to find out what their plans are. They have created courses on having a “positive view of marriage and childbearing” in collaboration with colleges. At high-profile political events, officials are spreading the word wherever they can.

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At the very least, the direct approach makes it more difficult for women to ignore appeals from China’s leader, Xi Jinping, to marry and have children. Some find it exceedingly intrusive; on social media, women have voiced their complaints about neighbourhood officials approaching them, some of whom they claim called to enquire about the date of their most recent menstrual cycle.

Making childbirth a national priority is one step towards making sure that women “always walk with the party,” according to Xi, who has overseen a crackdown on the feminist movement.

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China has one of the lowest total fertility rates in the world, which is a measure of how many children a woman is anticipated to produce in her lifetime.

China’s birth rate is estimated at approximately 1.0, compared to 1.62 in the United States last year.

The fertility campaign serves as a reminder of the Chinese Communist Party’s longstanding practice of controlling individuals’ reproductive choices. Beginning in the 1970s, it implemented a one-child policy for many years, sometimes harshly. Couples with unplanned pregnancies were penalised by officials, who even made some women have abortions.

The party gradually withdrew its control as China’s economy grew, but it never completely gave up control; in 2021, it decided that couples could have up to three children.

It is speeding back into view now.

The New York Times toured a number of maternity hospitals and areas where officials have made a point of encouraging reproduction in order to get a sense of what these initiatives entail. Out of ten women, seven of them reported that officials had enquired about their plans to start a family.

Many women felt that the government’s persistent nagging was antiquated and out of sync with their concerns. The high expense of raising children and how they would balance motherhood with their employment and other goals were not addressed. One woman stated that the decision to have children is a very personal.

The party believes that this is exactly why the new initiatives, dubbed a drive for a “new marriage and childbearing culture,” are so crucial.

In a news release, a government-run family planning group in Mudanjiang, a metropolis of over two million people in northern China, said that some people think that getting married and having kids are just personal decisions that belong to each individual, stating that “this view is wrong and one-sided.”

Government family planning groups, a network with hundreds of thousands of offshoots anchored in cities, businesses, and villages, handle the majority of the work. Overseen by a national association, they served as the primary agencies responsible for enforcing the one-child restriction for many years.

However, these days their focus is on advancing the so-called new fertility culture.

According to a national association article from last year, family planning officials in Miyun, a Beijing area of around 500,000 people, have established a 500-person propaganda squad to advance the cause.

According to the report, the team had spoken with almost half of Miyun’s “suitably aged” couples at least six times. It also erected new artwork in a park: a life-size cutout of a man and woman walking with three children, under a message urging couples not to wait too long to have children.

The article did not say how performance would be evaluated, but it did state that bonuses for officials would depend on how well they promoted the new culture.

Tracking and influencing a woman’s fertility strategy might start even before she marries.

Premarital health exams are free in many places, and during these, prospective parents are advised to have children before the age of 35 and are examined for inherited illnesses.

Many women said that shortly after completing the health exams, officials called to inform them that they were eligible to receive free prenatal supplements, such as folic acid.

Additionally, officials stay involved during pregnancy. Women are advised by government websites to register their pregnancies at community health centres, which are under local government supervision.

Some women valued the outreach since they felt taken care of. They have also applauded other aspects of the pro-fertility movement, such as increasing access to child care and enticing men to assist in the house.

Even people who thought the official questions were intrusive admitted that it was simple to disregard them. There is no indication that the excesses of the one-child era have been approached by government action.

Neither is it likely to, considering the political fallout that would ensue, according to Wang Feng, a University of California, Irvine demographics specialist.

However, the government’s rhetoric regarding childbirth as a public responsibility demonstrated that its broader mindset of attempting to regulate women’s fertility choices remained unchanged, he continued.

A few academics, activists, and regular women are concerned that the government may take more drastic measures to restrict the options available to them. In a number of recent health programs, the central government promised to cut back on “medically unnecessary abortions,” which sent some people into a social media frenzy as they feared access to the surgery may be restricted.

The government has promised similar things for more than a decade, but it has not defined what it means to be medically unnecessary. Due in part to the widespread availability of abortion due to the one-child policy, China has one of the highest abortion rates in the world. There haven’t been many reports of fresh challenges. However, many women are hesitant due of the government’s increasingly pressing demands for more children.

These worries are compounded by the fact that access to abortion is currently regulated in certain countries by bureaucrats as well as doctors, who may have interests beyond the strictly medical. In certain places, a woman seeking an abortion must first get authorisation from her local family planning department if she is 14 weeks or more pregnant.

In order to stop parents from terminating female fetuses—a common practice during the one-child era—the rule was introduced in the 2000s. However, representatives from two family planning offices in Nanjing, one of the cities with such a restriction, claimed they normally tried to dissuade applications. They claimed that they did not received any specific instructions to do so, but they both brought up the government’s decision to implement a three-child limit and the unwillingness of young people to have more kids.