Calls for single women's right to have children are growing louder. What reality do we actually face?

The "ultra-single society" has arrived. Our ways of living, and the rules and protections around them, should change with it.

On June 20, a Shanghai lawyer named Li Jun sent an application for review of a normative document (hereafter "the application") to the Department of Legal Affairs of the National Health Commission.

Li Jun told QDaily that after all her years as a lawyer, she already expected, the moment she posted the letter, that it would probably sink without a trace and go unanswered. "But I still believe individual cases push justice forward, that things change bit by bit," she said.

Li Jun challenges the current Technical Standards for Human Assisted Reproductive Technology, which grants the right to assisted reproduction only to "couples." She believes this plainly violates the Constitution of the People's Republic of China, the Population and Family Planning Law and other laws.

In the application, she makes specific demands about several provisions, above all about who is allowed to use the technology: in the clause "…and sign the Informed Consent Form and the Consent Form for Multi-Fetal Pregnancy Reduction with the infertile couple…," the words "infertile couple" should be struck and replaced with "couple or unmarried woman." In the accompanying supporting documents, "the ID cards and marriage certificate of the infertile couple" should be struck and replaced with "the ID cards of the couple or unmarried woman," and "proof of marriage" should be struck altogether.

"[These rules] mean that unmarried women, and lesbian women who cannot legally register a marriage in China, cannot legally use assisted reproductive technology to have children, nor can they use egg freezing to safeguard their own fertility. As a result, single women and lesbians are pushed to obtain assisted reproductive technology through illegal underground channels at home, or to go abroad to give birth or freeze their eggs, spending far more to have a child or to preserve the ability to have one." That is one passage from the application.

Li Jun graduated from Shanghai University of Political Science and Law, was licensed to practice in 2011, and has worked as a lawyer for seven years, following civil and family-planning cases for a long time. She says she has lately seen more and more single women with fertility needs: women who have not married or had children but want to freeze their eggs now, the way you would buy insurance. Without a marriage, though, they cannot use assisted reproduction to exercise a basic human right — the right to have a child.

"For me, fighting for egg-freezing rights today comes straight out of the family-planning policy. When you limit whether a person can have a child, that is a limit on human rights. And requiring a woman to be married before she can have a child narrows that right further," Li Jun said. She added that things that happened in her own family made her see how out of step family planning had become: "One relative of mine got pregnant unexpectedly, but weighed the family-planning fees and the effect on her job. Another had an IUD fitted, as family planning required, and got pregnant anyway; because being pregnant with an IUD in place might harm the child, in the end she had no choice but to give the child up."

1.

Almost everyone who campaigns for single women's egg-freezing rights brings up Xu Jinglei, and Li Jun is no exception.

In 2015, the actress Xu Jinglei revealed that two years earlier she had gone to the United States and frozen nine eggs. She was 41, and she said something to the public that is still quoted today: "This is the only regret medicine in the world."

Li Jun says the Xu Jinglei story is exactly what exposes how absurd the current law and system are. "Why is egg freezing so ordinary abroad? Some people say it's because other countries are more open. But no — reproductive rights abroad went through plenty of changes too."

As it happened, in the same year Xu Jinglei went public about freezing her eggs, Li Jun took a case for a 35-year-old unmarried mother from Dongguan, Guangdong Province.

The woman had gotten pregnant unexpectedly, later split up with her boyfriend and never married, and because she did not meet the requirements, she could not register her child for a hukou at the local police station.

She came to Li Jun and went to court. The case moved fast, closing in a little over a month, and it ended well: the child could be registered. But Li Jun says she was obstructed at every turn. "From the day the case was filed, the family-planning department, the subdistrict office and the residents' committee all came knocking. Because she still hadn't registered the child, she was threatened with a fine of several hundred thousand yuan. For a single woman that is an enormous sum, and there were many other pressures too."

It is worth noting that in 2015 the Chinese government had not yet opened up the two-child policy, family-planning rules had not been loosened, and many provinces still tied family planning to household registration. In Dongguan, an unmarried mother who wanted to register her child needed certain papers: a family-planning certificate; and, if she had been penalized, proof that she had paid the fine, a marriage certificate, court judgments, and so on.

Zhang Qing (a pseudonym), a Miao woman from Hubei, is a single mother. She is 32 now, with a two-year-old son.

In 2015 she got pregnant unexpectedly and decided to have the baby. At first she planned to give birth where she ran her guesthouse, in Hunan Province, but when she asked the hospital, it told her that without a marriage certificate and a birth permit it would not issue a birth certificate for her child.

No birth certificate meant the child could not get a hukou or go to school.

"Then I thought about going back to my hometown in Hubei — I'm from an ethnic minority, after all, and I guessed there might be some policy," Zhang Qing told QDaily. She later heard from a high-school classmate who handled household registration there that Hubei had a new policy under which family planning and hukou registration were no longer tied together. "As long as the child is born in a Hubei hospital, they'll issue a birth certificate whether or not you have a marriage certificate. With that birth certificate you can register the hukou, and everything becomes very simple."

After Zhang Qing had her child, her life changed a good deal. Money, among other things, is a question plenty of single women her age around her have to weigh.

Because she ran a guesthouse, Zhang Qing was comfortable enough financially to support herself and her son. But not every single mother can support two people the way she can. When that is the case, and society's support systems have no matching measures in place, life easily slides into hardship.

According to statistics, 50% of the 3.3 million low-income households in the United States are single women, many of them with children.

2.

On December 31, 2015, the General Office of the State Council issued a new policy, the Opinions on Resolving the Household Registration of People Without a Hukou, which explicitly barred authorities from setting conditions for hukou registration that the rules do not allow. Article 2, Point 1 sets out which supporting documents "people without a hukou born out of wedlock" may submit to register. Some provinces put the policy into effect quickly — Hubei, for one — but others did not follow up right away.

On January 1, 2016, the Chinese government fully implemented the two-child policy, stating clearly that no birth permit was needed for a first or second child: people only had to register with the family-planning department where they lived or where their hukou was.

In Shanghai, the city's current hukou registration rules state explicitly that "registering the birth of a child born out of wedlock" requires several documents to be checked, among them "the parents' residence permits," "the parents' marriage certificate" and a "medical certificate of birth."

Li Jun knows that fighting for unmarried mothers' rights is not the same as fighting for single women's right to freeze their eggs, but it was an important reason she sent the application. "I know they're two different ideas, but one way to put reproductive rights into practice is to let women freeze their eggs. I can't push too many ideas out at once, because in traditional Chinese thinking having a child outside marriage is seen as a very bad thing. So I start with the small pieces and take them one at a time."

According to a China Daily report, a month after Li Jun sent her application, China's National Health Commission said in an interview that "current laws do not prohibit single women from having children. The National Health Commission will step up investigation and research, gradually build consensus, improve the relevant laws, regulations and policy measures, and effectively protect women's rights to reproduction, employment and career development."

But Li Jun told QDaily that she still has had no official reply to the specific requests in her application. Going forward, she said, she will take the official response — or the lack of one — into formal legal channels, and look into whether administrative reconsideration can produce an answer; there are not many rules governing the review of normative documents, so all she can do is try several angles at once.

Li Jun is not the only one who has noticed single women's demand for egg freezing. In March this year QDaily reported on a woman named Zhan Yingying (a pseudonym) who wrote to a deputy of the Jilin Provincial People's Congress — she, too, was fighting for single women's right to freeze their eggs.

In the letter, Zhan Yingying wrote: "When I learned that unmarried women in China aren't allowed to use assisted reproductive technology, I felt very disappointed and hurt. I felt I was being discriminated against because I'm not married, and robbed of the chance to freeze my eggs. That is really not fair."

Li Jun and Zhan Yingying alike are voicing the growing needs of China's single women — needs that, of course, include the right to have children.

3. Is China entering an "ultra-single society"?

In June 2017, China's Ministry of Civil Affairs published the 2016 Statistical Bulletin on the Development of Social Services. The section on marriage showed one plain fact: China's marriage rate had begun to shrink. In 2016, 11.428 million couples registered their marriages according to law, down 6.7% from the year before.

Since 2013 China's marriage rate has stopped growing and has slid year after year, while the divorce rate has risen every year since 2009.

Sample survey data in the China Statistical Yearbook 2017 shows that of the 965,321 people sampled nationwide aged 15 and over, 18.9% were unmarried — 488,944 men and 476,376 women.

These are not actual national population figures, but the fact that unmarried men and women alone make up 18.9% of the sample suggests the real number is considerable.

The sociologist Li Yinhe told BBC Chinese that the trend toward staying single is rising in Chinese society. Women are also calling more loudly for autonomy and freedom in marriage, and more people are paying attention to these questions. "It used to be that everyone had to marry — a man marries when he grows up, a woman marries when she grows up. But now many people are actively choosing to be single. That is a rare change in China."

Quite a few media outlets have reported that China now has more than 200 million single men and women, and that the whole society has entered a wave of singlehood.

That wave is not unique to China.

The American author Rebecca Traister's book All the Single Ladies, published in Chinese in July, cites a report from the Population Reference Bureau saying that the United States has formally entered what it calls the era of "a dramatic reversal": for the first time in American history, the number of single women (never married, widowed, divorced or separated) has passed the number of married women.

Among American adults, those under 34 who have never married make up 46% of the total population — a share that rose by 12% in less than a decade. That points to one thing: a woman under 30 today is very unlikely to marry. Only about 20% of American women marry before 29. In 1960 the figure was close to 60%.

In April 2017 the Asahi Shimbun cited survey data from Japan's National Institute of Population and Social Security Research showing that in 2015, 23.37% of Japanese men and 14.06% of Japanese women had never married by the age of 50 — three percentage points higher for each than in the 2010 survey, and a record high.

A survey by Hakuhodo, the well-known Japanese advertising and research firm, found that by 2035 the "lifetime unmarried rate" will be close to 30% for Japanese men and close to 20% for women. By 2035, of Japan's population aged 15 and over, 48.05 million will be single and about 52.79 million will have a spouse — meaning roughly 48% of Japanese people will live single.

That is why a new word has entered Japanese society in recent years to describe the phenomenon: the "ultra-single society."

The "ultra-single society" is redefining daily life faster than anyone can react. Beyond the direct blow to the traditional institution of marriage, marrying and having children later also changes what people want from assisted reproductive technology.

This July, Trip.com Group announced it would give female managers at mid and senior levels between 100,000 and 2 million yuan so they could use high-tech assisted-reproduction benefits such as egg freezing.

James Liang, Trip.com Group's co-founder and executive chairman, said: "The company offers assisted-reproduction benefits to take a worry off the minds of female employees of childbearing age, so they can throw themselves fully into work during the golden years of their careers without putting off raising the next generation." Liang is also a well-known Chinese demographer.

Trip.com Group is not alone: large tech companies such as Facebook, Google and Apple offered similar benefits to their female employees much earlier.

In 2012 the United States opened clinical egg freezing to the public. Last year the New York Times, citing data from the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, reported that of 51 relevant clinics in California, 33 offered tailored services for Chinese clients, such as Chinese-language documents and websites and Mandarin-speaking staff. Dr. Kevin Doody, the society's president at the time, also said that between 2009 and 2014 the number of egg-freezing cycles in the United States rose from 568 to 6,165.

The South China Morning Post has reported that demand for egg freezing in Asia has grown sharply in recent years, speeding up the growth of assisted-reproduction clinics abroad. That demand comes from infertile couples, from women who marry late, and from people whose way of life differs from traditional marriage.

Yet according to figures released by China's health authorities, nearly 500,000 people went through assisted reproduction in China in 2016 — far below actual demand. A director at the reproductive medicine center of Shanghai Tenth People's Hospital said: "Demand in China is huge, but we simply can't handle it here."

More and more Chinese people go abroad to freeze their eggs or use assisted reproduction, though exact figures for this "birth tourism" business remain unclear. The Qianzhan Industry Research Institute has put a number on the market: in 2017, Chinese spending on assisted reproductive technology rose 22%, to US$1.4 billion.

Eric Klinenberg, a sociology professor at New York University, published Going Solo in 2015, examining how the rise of single living will shape our lives from here. He argues it will change not only how people understand themselves and their intimate relationships, but also how cities are built and how economies change — even how people come of age, and how they grow old and die.

How much, though, do people know about this new kind of single life?

This June, an episode of Behind the Headlines with Wentao from two years earlier suddenly drew fresh attention online, because it dealt with questions facing single women. It was an interview with Yu Feihong, now 47.

On the show, the host Dou Wentao asked Yu Feihong, "Why have you stayed single all this time, right up to now?"

Yu Feihong answered: "I don't think being single or being married is a particularly hard question for me — I stay in whichever state is comfortable." Then she added: "A lot of my friends have very rich inner lives — men, of course. I don't think you can separate men from women on this. Does being single make a woman abnormal? I don't think so."

Cover image from Dakota Corbin on Unsplash