The Chinese Government Must End its Abusive Family Planning Policy
December 21, 2010
“I don’t have a choice over my own body. If I don’t insert it [the intrauterine device], I’ll be detained,” wrote a woman on an internet forum for mothers.[1]
“I discovered that in China, in this society, women in villages have no human rights. They [local family planning officials] even said that I am under their management, that I do not have a choice, that whatever they say I have to do,” wrote another woman on the same forum. [2]
This year marked the thirtieth anniversary of China’s family planning policy, often referred to as the “one-child policy.” In recent years, the government has carved out many exceptions to the “one-child” aspect of the policy, leading to widespread speculation about its current status and future: are people still bound by the policy, or can they pay their way out of it and have as many children as they want? Is the government going to loosen the policy, allowing couples to have more than one child?
CHRD argues that this focus is misplaced. Though the National Population and Family Planning Law, enacted in 2002, was ostensibly designed to rein in abusive practices associated with the family planning policy, the Chinese government continues to use coercion and violence to implement the policy.[3] The family planning policy continues to violate Chinese citizens’ reproductive rights regardless of the number of children each couple is allowed to have, and will do so unless the policy in its current form is abolished.
In this report, CHRD documents human rights abuses associated with the implementation of the family planning policy from across the country in the past five years, demonstrating that serious violations continue to occur despite talk of change. For example:
- Married people are pressured to sign “contracts” with the government in which they promise to comply with various aspects of the policy;
- Married people are required to obtain permission from the government before they give birth;
- Married women are pressured to undergo regular gynecological tests in order for the government to monitor their reproductive statuses;
- Married women are urged to insert intrauterine devices (IUDs) or be sterilized when they have reached their birth quotas,[4] thus depriving them of their choice over birth control methods;
- Women who are pregnant out-of-quota—which includes premarital pregnancies—are often forced to abort the fetuses, even in advanced pregnancies;
- Men and women who have violated the policy, as well as their families and relatives, have been punished with arbitrary detention, beatings, fines, and loss of property; others have been fired from their jobs and their out-of-quota children have been denied household registration permits (hukou);
- Both parents and children face discrimination as a result of the policy, as education and employment opportunities, and even social services, are linked to compliance with the policy. The highly arbitrary and uneven way the policy is being implemented across the country also results in unequal treatment between couples whose circumstances are otherwise similar.
These abuses frequently occur in local campaigns launched by authorities to crack down on what they perceive as widespread non-compliance with the policy, and occasionally outside of these campaigns at the whim of the officials involved in implementing the policy. Family planning officials at the grassroots level are given incentives as well as pressure by their superiors to fulfill certain targets in carrying out the policy. Individual officers and their teams are pitted against each other in competition to meet these quotas, and those who excel in enforcing a certain number of the “four surgeries” (insertion of IUDs, sterilizations, abortions and late-term abortions) or the “three examinations” (examinations for pregnancies, the status of IUDs, and for gynecological diseases or illnesses) are given better pay, bonuses and promotions. Those who do not are criticized and their careers are jeopardized. The women and men whose bodies are concerned are seen as numbers, rather than people whose choices should be respected.
The implementation of the policy is extremely uneven across the country. Not only do provincial governments adopt different regulations, but the work of implementing the policy is subject to various local policy directives, as well as the interpretations of local officials. A woman bearing her second son might be forced to abort the fetus in some areas, while a similarly situated woman might be asked to pay a fine in another area. Furthermore, the motivations of local officials play a large role in how the family planning policy is enforced. For example, in developed areas, where population pressures have eased as the result of a variety of factors, some officials may refrain from pursuing aggressive measures, while officials in other areas may order strict and brutal campaigns to further their own careers.
While it has become easy for the rich and well-connected to skirt the regulations, and for China’s small yet growing middle class to buy their way out of the policy, many cannot afford the fines, called “social maintenance fees.”[5] These fines have become an important source of income for local governments and family planning offices, especially in rural areas. As local officials have wide latitude to set the levels of the fines, the amounts are highly arbitrary.
A combination of factors—fear, paucity of legal knowledge, lack of confidence in the judiciary and in the government in general on the part of the victims, as well as the silencing of journalists and lawyers by government officials—make it particularly difficult for CHRD to obtain a detailed picture of the implementation of the policy across the country. For example, we do not know to any degree of certainty or precision the total number of abuses, how they vary across the country, or how they have changed in the last few years. However, despite these limitations, what is clear based on recent cases documented in this report is that the problems described are ongoing, egregious and directed mostly against women.
CHRD concludes its report by calling on the Chinese government to abolish its family planning policy, and for officials who have violated the rights of Chinese citizens while enforcing the policy to be held accountable. We also call on the Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women as well as the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights to focus on the family planning policy in their next reviews of the Chinese government’s compliance with its obligations under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, respectively. The two committees should also call on the government to abolish the current policy in order to conform to international human rights standards. Moreover, CHRD urges the Chinese government to extend an invitation to the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women to visit China.
Table of Contents
A. Evolution of the family planning policy in China
B. International standards and Chinese law
International law
Chinese law
C. Abuses related to the implementation of the family planning policy
Lack of reproductive health information and services before marriage
Marriage and first child: surveillance, permission and incentives
Coercive birth control measures after a couple reaches their “birth quota”
Fines
Loss of jobs and social services
Crackdown campaigns: arbitrary detention, seizure of property, and violence
D. Deprivation of choice
E. Discrimination against one-child policy violators and their children
F. Enforcers of China’s family planning policy
G. Lack of Remedies and Accountability
H. Conclusion and Recommendations
Please click here to download the entire report in .pdf format.
[1] “Response from respondent 25: urgent!!! Can I refuse to be inserted with [contraceptive] rings? How do you handle the family planning officials and not be inserted with rings?” (24楼 回复:急！！！不上环可以吗？怎么可以应付计生办不用上环？), March 26, 2008, http://bbs.ci123.com/post/2819169.html/15.
[2] “Response from respondent 42: urgent!!! Can I refuse to be inserted with [contraceptive] rings? How do you handle the family planning officials and not be inserted with rings?” (24楼 回复:急！！！不上环可以吗？怎么可以应付计生办不用上环？), March 26, 2008, http://bbs.ci123.com/post/2819169.html/15.
[3] In China, the policy is officially referred to as the “family planning policy” (计划生育政策), also known as the “one-child policy.” In this report, we will refer to the policy as “family planning policy.” This is because the term one-child policy, although poignant, does not fully describe the situation, as some couples are allowed more than one child. Furthermore, it is the coercion and violation of reproductive rights, not the number of children allowed, that is the focus of the report.
[4] “Birth quota” refers to the number of children a couple is allowed to have. Most couples are only allowed one child, but some may have more than one child if they meet certain criteria set by the government. Please see section A for a lengthier discussion on this topic.
[5] shehui fuyang fei (社会抚养费)
