China's More-Children Policy Is Getting Invasive

After decades of enforcing a one-child policy, Chinese authorities are trying to change the country's one-child reality. The country's fertility rate—the total number of children the average woman has in her lifetime—has fallen to an estimated 1.0, one of the lowest in the world, and a huge network of government family planning associations that used to enforce the one-child policy is now pushing "fertility culture," the New York Times reports. "Some people believe that marriage and childbirth are only private matters, and up to each individual. This view is wrong and one-sided," a planning association in Mudanjiang, northeast China, said in a news release earlier this year.

Some women have complained about officials going door-to-door to ask about their childbearing plans—or calling them to enquire about their menstrual cycles. The Times spoke to women in maternity hospitals and in neighborhoods targeted by the fertility campaign. Some said they welcomed parts of the program, including better child-care resources, but many said they found the attention intrusive—and outdated. "We're not like people born in the 1970s or '80s. Everyone knows that people born after the '90s generally don't want kids," one woman in northeast China said. "Whether you want to have children is a very private issue."

With China's population falling, some fear the government will take tougher measures, including new restrictions on abortion. The one-child policy introduced in the 1970s was replaced by a two-child policy in 2015. The limit was raised to three children in 2021, but the fertility rate kept falling. The legacy of the one-child policy "will make it exceptionally hard for China to escape demographic doom," the Economist's Chaguan columnist wrote earlier this year. "China's population structure has been left permanently skewed. Brutal, often corrupt, officials enforced rules with propaganda, fines, and tens of millions of abortions and sterilizations, many of them involuntary." Because parents who wanted sons chose to abort girls, China now has 30 million more men than women, Chauguan wrote. (More China stories.)