Today's Women in China (12/6/2026)
China has long sought to control women’s bodies. Increasingly, they’re making their own choices
Women are under pressure to devote their bodies to childbearing as the government tries to encourage more pregnancies.
In the summer of 1991, Li was heavily pregnant when local officials rounded her up along with other women from her village and loaded them onto trucks to be taken for forced abortions at the local hospital. A doctor was due to see her at 2pm to terminate her pregnancy but she went into labour early and gave birth to a baby boy in the hospital’s boiler room.
“They tried to stop people from giving birth, but once the baby was actually born, they wouldn’t go as far as to kill him,” Li said. She was ordered to pay a 6,500 yuan fine – the equivalent of several years of income for the farmer – and to be sterilised.
Everywhere around her, infants died, Li recalls. “Infants from the forced inductions were all dead, there were a lot of them, they were burned and thrown in the trash,” she said. “Those women were all crying.”
Another woman from Shen, now in her 70s, said that she was one month shy of giving birth to a baby boy in 1991 when she was given an injection to induce labour, killing the foetus.
“If you refused the injection, they would tear down your house, break into your home to arrest you, and bar you from going to work,” she said. “So many women were dragged away”.
The cost and competitiveness of child-rearing in modern China are the biggest deterrents, despite the government’s offers of subsidies and tax breaks for having more children.
Another recent study found that nearly 50% of 18- to 24-year-old women said they don’t want children, up from 6% in 2012. The share of men who don’t want children has also increased, but only to nearly 20%.
“In the past, people were fined for having second children,” says Chen Ying, a 40-year-old restaurant worker in Shen. Nowadays, people “simply can’t afford it”.