When Yang Li* turned 30, she gave herself three years to decide whether or not she wanted to have children. But as the years ticked by, working a busy job in Beijing, Yang felt none the wiser about if or when she wanted to become a mother. So last year, a month shy of her 34th birthday, she decided to freeze her eggs.
The problem was, as a single woman in China, no fertility clinic would help her. Despite China’s push to boost the birthrate, only married couples with fertility problems can use egg-freezing services or any kind of assisted reproductive technologies.
“I talked to a doctor, and she told me that to freeze my eggs in China, I either need a husband or I need to have cancer. And I told her, I don’t want either,” Yang remembers.
After researching various options online, Yang travelled to the Czech Republic in September to undergo an egg retrieval and freezing process. The whole treatment cost her about 25,000 yuan (£2,660) plus an annual storage fee. She plans to go back for another round this year.
Yang is part of a growing generation of educated, urban women who are delaying marriage and motherhood – much to the chagrin of China’s leaders. Last year China’s birth rate fell to a record low of 6.39 per 1,000 people and the population shrank by almost 3 million. Boosting China’s birthrate has been linked to the goal of national rejuvenation and Xi Jinping, China’s president, has called on society to “actively cultivate a new culture of marriage and childbearing”.
The use of “social egg freezing” – for the purposes of delaying having a baby until later in life – is seen by China’s leadership as antithetical to such a drive. Barred from accessing the services that tens of thousands of women in other countries avail themselves of each year, Chinese women with the means are looking overseas to preserve their hopes of becoming a mother later in life.
Chinese social media, in particular Xiaohongshu, a female-focused app with more than 200 million users, is awash with young women exchanging tips on where to go to procure the treatment.
Yang saw positive reviews of the Czech experience on Xiaohongshu when she was researching potential destinations. In the end, she settled on the Czech Republic because it was cheaper than going to the US, and because the country allows frozen eggs to be transported out of the country for IVF later down the line.
“It was very difficult to get practical information,” says Yang, who used a VPN to bypass China’s blocks on accessing the open internet to search on Google as well as Xiaohongshu. “I have the luxury of being able to financially afford it and also the luxury from my work to be able to travel on holiday, because it’s quite a lengthy period of time …
“So I think I am really lucky, but if you asked me again, I think this has been a really painful process.”
Another woman, 36, recently posted about her experience of travelling to Laos to freeze her eggs. “It’s not a small amount of money, but for me, it’s to appease my fertility anxiety for the next 10 years.”
Many more Chinese women feel similarly. A study published last year by the economists Ren Zeping and Liang Jianzhang found that more than 65% of 30- to 34-year-olds hoped to preserve their fertility via egg freezing.
But the Chinese government has so far not welcomed this trend. In 2020, the national health commission said that allowing single women to freeze their eggs could give women “false hope” and encourage them to delay motherhood, “which is not conducive to protecting the health of women and offspring”. The topic of relaxing the rules around egg freezing is routinely discussed at China’s political meetings but so far the national policy has remained fixed.
Lijia Zhang, a writer who is working on a book about Chinese women’s changing attitudes towards marriage and motherhood, expects demographic pressures will force China’s policymakers to loosen restrictions. “It is just a matter of time before the authorities will relax the law,” Zhang said. “Without making a song and dance about it, most provinces have allowed single women to register their children and some places even give them maternity benefits.”
For some women, the changes cannot come soon enough. In 2022, a Chinese court overruled an attempt by Teresa Xu, a single woman, to sue a Beijing hospital that refused to allow her to freeze her eggs, on the grounds that the hospital was violating her rights. Xu appealed against the ruling last year but is still awaiting a verdict.
For Yang, such barriers reflect a societal attitude that educated, older women should not be having children, despite the low birthrate. “My theory is society doesn’t really want my kids. They don’t want kids to be raised by self-reflective parents like me.”
*Name has been changed
Additional research by Chi Hui Lin
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Watch the Guardian documentary Frozen in Time where single women Lei and Abu are banned from freezing their eggs in China, so travel to the US to pursue their dreams of motherhood.
