‘My Body, My Choice.’ Chinese Women Also Need to Stand Up for Their Rights
By Qinglang Wu, October 2022
While I am a Chinese citizen that born and raised in China, my cousin is a U.S. citizen who grew up in China but only has a Chinese tourist visa.
In the spring of 2011, my aunt set out alone from China to the United States. This was all because China at the time was still strictly following the one-child policy for fear of a population explosion. Without a birth permit from the local family-planning office, my cousin's birth would have exposed my family to huge fines and even forced abortions. As a last resort, my aunt had to travel to the United States and give birth to my cousin there in the fall.
Such examples were common in China at the time when the one-child policy was in place. For those who were less well-off, they would be forced to go down the path of abortion because they could not afford to pay the fine. In 2015, China fully liberalized its two-child policy, and the one-child policy, which had been in place since the 1980s, finally exited the political arena; in 2021, to ease China's aging population and increase the proportion of young adults, the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee promulgated the three-child policy.
The evolution from one child to three children ostensibly gives Chinese women more choice in reproduction, but in fact, the family planning policy is essentially a restriction of the individual by the center of power under the socialist system.
In the practice of socialism, both productive forces and relations of production must be adjusted according to the plan, and people, as the most important link of productive forces, will inevitably appear for the planned production of the population. Social wealth is produced according to plan, while the population is produced according to nature, which inevitably creates a contradiction between social development and population growth. Therefore, the emergence of family planning in China was not a necessity to protect human rights, but rather to maintain social development and stabilize the regime.
Under a power-based system, the people are in a weak position relative to the government. In China, family planning is implemented from top to bottom at all levels. When the policy is implemented, the latter is inevitably sacrificed for the former when it comes to the choice between national interests and personal interests. This violation of reproductive rights by "planned" rights has been going on in Chinese society for half a century.
This made the right-to-life discussion in the United States unfamiliar to me and my friends when we first saw it. In the context of Chinese society, the one-child, and two-child policies have been implemented in our generation and in previous generations growing up, and we have been taught that we cannot have children.
This past June, the Roe.V.Wade case was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, and American women's right to abortion was lost. The debate over abortion rights is once again back at the forefront, and people are back on the streets to speak out for their rights. When the activism of American women fighting for the rights of their own bodies reached China, it sparked a part of social thinking. And I began to reflect on the parallels between family planning in China and anti-abortion in the United States, the rights of Chinese women to control their own bodies.
The Supreme Court has not banned abortion but has delegated the right to legalize abortion to the states and to Congress. And since it does not address the fundamental issue of abortion rights, that is, the definition of the beginning of life, the debate over abortion rights in the United States is divided between the pro-life and pro-choice parties, i.e., Republicans and Democrats who support different ideas.
The underlying issue has not been resolved, and abortion rights have instead become a sociopolitical issue between the two parties to capture power and motivate voters to vote. Women's own ideas and personal wishes were ignored and instead became a tool in the political battle. So, on June 25, people took to the streets with the slogans "my body, my choice" and "bans off my body".
Although we don't know how much of an impact these mass protests and marches will have on society, the only thing we can believe is that despite our inability to escape such control, the quest for individuals’ will will continue, rather than be left to perish in silence.
Letting abortion, or not letting abortion, both in fact an infringement on women's willingness to have children. This is why women in China need to look at the loss of women's abortion rights in the United States and the activism of its masses for their rights and reflect on how far we as individuals can dominate our own bodies; rise up to fight so that women's rights are not reduced to a political tool.
