A single voice
Lawyer faces social pressure in bid to give single women right to freeze eggs
Aweek before this year’s national two sessions, Zhan Yingying (pseudonym) was excited to finally receive positive feedback from a deputy to the National People’s Congress (NPC). The deputy told Zhan that he would be willing to hand in her proposal on an issue that was extremely close to her heart: giving women the legal right to freeze their eggs in Chinese hospitals.
Zhan, 29, is a lawyer in Guangzhou, South China’s Guangdong Province. She had previously mailed 64 NPC deputies from Northeast China’s Jilin Province, pleading with them to propose that nationwide hospitals should allow unmarried women to have children using medical reproductive technologies, including egg freezing, at the upcoming meeting which convenes on March 5.
She explained that the reason she reached out to Jilin deputies is that the province is the only one in the country that issued a guideline in 2002 allowing single women who didn’t want to marry to give birth using legal medical technology.
In practice, however, this guideline was met with a backlash from local hospitals as it goes against national regulations. Currently, only married women who want to have test-tube babies and single women suffering from malignant tumors are allowed to freeze their eggs.
Furthermore, children born to unmarried people are not allowed to acquire hukou (household registration) with the government.
Zhan said that as a single woman who has no plans to either get married or have children in the near future, it’s her obligation to make this demand heard by the public. She has also learned that there are other deputies from Guangdong who will be making the same proposal at this meeting.
“Many women in China have similar demands. That’s why I want to stand up to push forward the legalization of single women’s fertility rights,” she told the Global Times.
Spreading trends
It’s been reported that there are about 200 million single adults in China. In first-tier cities, there is already a prominent trend of socalled “left-over women,” who are giving up on the idea of marriage, and this trend is now spreading to smaller cities.
“I don’t want to get married, but I adore kids. I don’t want to risk my career at the current stage but I plan to have a baby in the future. So I need to have the right to freeze my eggs when I’m still young,” she said. She added that many women she knew believed that marriage was not essential, but children are.
Unable to freeze their eggs in China, some Chinese women travel overseas to carry out the procedure. But according to Zhan, this option is limited to “middleclass women” who can afford it, and is a luxury for most people.
Zhan started paying attention to Chinese women’s fertility rights more than two years ago after Chinese actress Xu Jinglei publicly said that she had frozen her eggs in the US.
Zhan also carried out research into fertility rights with her friends in 2016. One of them had even gone to several public hospitals in Jilin to test their attitudes to the province’s guidelines, only to find out that these hospitals shunned the practice, saying that they would adhere to the national guidelines.
According to Zhan, there are a number of single women in Jilin who have frozen their eggs, but most refuse to share their experience. “They’re unwilling to stand out to talk about their stories. The social pressure is still quite heavy,” she said.
Ethics and morals
This time, the biggest obstacle for Zhan was contacting these NPC deputies. Although their names were published, searching for their contact information takes a great deal of effort. A few days ago, a man sent Zhan a message, telling her that he is not the deputy that she was looking for but was willing to offer his help if she requires it.
After Zhan’s recent actions were reported in the media, public opinion was divided. Many voiced strong opposition to it, saying the practice violates social ethics and morals. As for the deputy who offered Zhan his support, he was also unwilling to release his personal information or speak to the media.
Zhan said that she understands people’s concerns. “Most of them worry about how children are raised. They think single women can’t provide children a healthy environment to grow up in. But through my friends’ experiences and the stories I’ve heard, children can receive the best care and love in such families,” she said.
In December 2017, the National Health and Family Planning Commission said on its website that it would conduct research into the feasibility of “egg-freezing” and other technologies, and consider refining the relevant laws and regulations to protect single women’s rights.
Zhan views this as a positive sign. “It takes time to change traditional beliefs as well as to amend the law. Next, we need to have more experts join in the discussions and help the government carry out its research,” she said.
The age of 35 is often viewed as the watershed for women who want to give birth. She hopes that in the next six years, the rights she is fighting for will be enshrined into law.