The Regulatory Model of Abortion in China through a Feminist Lens

Introduction

Access to safe and legal abortion is essential to promoting women’s right to health and also to the exercise of control over their life choices (Sclater, Ebtehaj, Jackson, & Richards, 2009). It is widely believed that this right is infringed by various legal limits on the provision of abortion, because restrictive law forces abortion-seeking women to resort to unsafe back-street services (Warriner, 2006). Therefore, many feminist scholars have argued for the liberalization of abortion and have considered this to be a success in terms of feminism or a sign of winning the struggle for a woman’s right to choose (Eriksson, 2001; Cook & Dickens, 2003). This paper will provide a normative analysis of the Chinese model of abortion regulation and attempt to remind feminists to be aware that regulating abortion in a liberal form may not necessarily bring women the right to health and decision-making. As Raymond (1993) suggests, a law that superficially looks liberal may provide women with “a supposed liberty that requires women to give up more freedom and a right to privacy that is more accurately a right to private privilege for men (and some women)” (p. 77).

Abortion in Chinese is rengong liuchan and rengong yinchan, which literally mean artificial slipping delivery and artificial induced delivery respectively. The former process involves the use of abortion drugs and vacuum aspiration to end gestation within 13 weeks and the latter process means termination of middle-term (from 14 to 24 weeks) or late-term (more than 24 weeks) gestation by dilatation and evacuation (Lü & Gai, 2004). There are two types of termination offered by the abortion services in China: medical and surgical. Both can be performed in public institutions and in approved private medical institutions. The legislation on abortion in China, to a large degree, is determined by policy making that relates to the national population. Due to the implementation of birth-control policy, abortion has been liberalized since the beginning of the 1980s. China’s population-control programs, particularly the one-child policy, are subject to strong criticisms from the outside world. These criticisms are mainly targeted at the violation of women’s reproductive rights and the widespread use of sex-selective techniques against women (Aird, 1991; Greenhalgh, 2008; Mungello, 2008; Ebenstein, 2010). Compared with the controversial population-control policy, the Chinese law of abortion has not received serious attention or many negative comments. On the contrary, it has been regarded by some Western legal scholars, such as Luk and Ridgon, as “one of the most liberal abortion laws in the world” (Luk, 1977, p. 389) because it does not have any penalties for “having or performing an abortion at any stage of pregnancy…” (Rigdon, 1996, p. 546). These arguments superficially look plausible for the following two reasons. First, the Chinese regulatory model does not restrict the time when abortion can be provided lawfully. In other words, women are allowed to abort at any stage of their pregnancies. Second, apart from sex selection, abortion, technically, can be performed on any other grounds, including medical reasons and a broad range of social reasons.

However, in reality, the implementation of the law suggests that such a liberal model does not represent the state’s respect for women’s right to health and to self-termination. In 2007, Souyao, a Chinese online news website, highlights the problem of selling abortion pills unlawfully in some shops on Taobao, which is the biggest Chinese one-stop online platform (Da, 2007). While knowing that it was illegal to buy abortion drugs without a physician’s prescription and surveillance, many anonymous users comment that it was a more convenient and cost-effective choice compared with legal services. Apart from taking unreliable pills, a large number of women resort to surgical abortions in illegal and unreliable clinics every year. While annually there are 10 million abortions carried out in registered medical institutions in China, the number of unlawful abortions is estimated to be even larger (Shan & Qian, 2009). The back-street abortion market raises the following questions: under a liberal regulatory model, why are many women opting to seek unlawful and unreliable termination means? Is the law of abortion in China respectful of women’s rights to health and to reproductive decision-making? And if not, why does law not grant women the right to decide whether to terminate or continue their pregnancy? By scrutinizing the regulatory model of abortion in China through a feminist lens, this paper first plans to resolve the specific questions posed above. A more general, but also more difficult, task undertaken in this paper is to argue that a woman-friendly regulatory model that is beyond the simple liberalization of abortion has to be formulated and brought into line with the principle of respect for women’s rights to health and to self-determination. The law’s respect for these rights not only requires decriminalizing abortion; it also involves enhancing nondirective support from the medical profession and the state.

To achieve these two objectives, this paper will first investigate the regulation of abortion in law and the access barriers in practice. It will then examine how significantly this model is affected by the state’s policy making in relation to the population and by the Chinese-style practice of family planning. Finally, this paper will suggest some feasible proposals for a woman-friendly reform of abortion law.

The Access Barriers against Women

The statutes in China with regard to abortion are not included in a specific code or act, but are mainly in the two pieces of national legislation called the Code on Maternal and Infant Health 1995 (the 1995 Code) and the Code on Population and Family Planning 2002 (the 2002 Code). In addition, access to abortion is normally regulated by these two codes together with the state’s population policy.¹ Since 1979, the state has advocated a series of birth-control programs in order to reduce the national population (Winckler, 2002). As a consequence, abortion has been officially defined by the party state as bujiu cuoshi (literally, a remedial method), which means a backup measure adopted to make up for contraception failure. The implementation of the national birth-control policy had a significant effect on the enactment of the 1995 Code and the 2002 Code. While they state that citizens have the right (not) to reproduce, they also convey the message that family-planning measures, including abortion, should be adopted by married couples in order to fulfill the constitutional birth-control duty.²

The two codes do not set a time limit on when abortion can be performed lawfully. Furthermore, they do not restrict the statutory grounds on which abortion can be carried out, except when it is for nonmedical sex-selection. If women are clinically suitable for an abortion, they can request it at any registered public or private hospital, and their requests do not need to be approved by their doctors or sexual partners. Additionally, according to the 2002 Code, if married women of reproductive age seek to terminate their unplanned pregnancies, the state may provide family-planning funds.³ Therefore, literally, the Chinese model of abortion law looks liberal. Nonetheless, to examine this model through a feminist lens, I plan to undertake the following three tasks: first, to investigate the barriers against women seeking to access abortion that might exist behind this liberal model; second, to deeply scrutinize the burdens on women of fulfilling the population policy; third, to analyze the Chinese-style practice of family planning. In the rest of this section, I will provide an in-depth analysis of the access barriers against women who need abortions. By doing so, I attempt to explore the underlying character behind the liberal regulatory model, which is disrespectful of women’s rights to health and self-determination.

The Burden on Women of Achieving the State’s Population Goals

The regulation of family-planning services in China is significantly determined by the state’s policy making in relation to population. Distinct from the current model of abortion law, that law in the Maoist era was quite restrictive because a pronatalist policy was advocated. Due to tumultuous decades of famines and wars in the period from the late Qing dynasty to the nationalist era (between about 1900 and 1949), the Chinese population was small and the birth rate was relatively low in the early 1950s. After the communist takeover, “the nation celebrated large birth numbers as a sign of recovery” (Scharping, 2003, p. 24). Mao believed that the more people there were, the greater the energy for socialist revolution, so he put forward the slogan of “strength in numbers” and emphasized that a large population was a great advantage and essential to national economic development (Peng, 1997, p. 289).

To enable women to produce more children, they were discouraged and even prohibited by the Maoist state from accessing abortion and contraception. The Maoist government’s advocacy for a large population was translated into the national population policy and the ban on abortion and contraception. Apart from restricting access to family-planning services, to encourage citizens to have larger families, the state awarded women who had more than 10 children the designation of “Glorious Mother” (Peng, 1997). A political document entitled “Kongzhi Nüganbu Duotai Fangfa” (literally, the measure of controlling female cadres’ access to abortion) and enacted in 1950 stated that women should be prohibited from terminating their pregnancies unless their lives were seriously threatened by continuance of gestation or unless they had a severe genetic mental disease. Moreover, to have an abortion women had to obtain their husband’s written consent and their requests needed to be approved by their doctors. Women were left little say in their reproductive decisions because their procreative preferences were subject to the state’s pronatalist goal.

Due to the restrictive access in the pronatalist era, women could be forced to continue their unwanted pregnancies to full term or to resort to illegal and unreliable termination means. According to a report in People’s Daily published in 1956, to end unwanted pregnancies a large number of women had to adopt unsafe means, such as jumping from a height and taking poisonous herbs (Zhong, 1957). While there is no official figure that shows how many women died or were permanently injured because of using unsafe termination methods, maternal morbidity and mortality caused by adopting these measures were believed to be high, in accordance with a report issued by the Ministry of Health in 1956. It indicates that in the 1950s the use of unsafe means of terminating gestation was very common, particularly in rural areas where many women were injured or died from eating living tadpoles or river snails and taking an overdose of quinine in order to end their gestation (Peng, 1997). Clearly, in the pronatalist era, the state’s ban on an abortion service infringed women’s right to health and to self-determination.

The population policy in the post-Maoist era (1979 to the present) becomes Malthusian and sharply distinguishable from the Maoist one. Consequently, the ban on abortion access has been lifted since the late 1970s. The legalization of abortion was not carried out because of the state’s desire to take women’s rights more seriously but because of the crucial change in the state’s policy making relating to population. This change was due to the fact that by about the late 1970s, after three decades of implementing the pronatalist policy, the state had achieved its population objective. The population had increased dramatically from 574 million in 1954 to 1.03 billion in 1982 (Bureau of Statistics, 1954, 1982). The excessive demographic growth resulted in the first post-Maoist government’s fear that the state’s economic production could not keep pace with and could even be damaged by the population growth. In 1981, Deng, the party leader of the first post-Maoist government, announced that reducing the large population was as “must-do” task which had to be achieved by all means, including administrative and economic methods. One of these measures was carrying out the well-known one-child policy, which was claimed to be “the most rigorous, comprehensive, and ambitious birth program in the world” (Rigdon, 1996, p. 545). The one-child policy did not apply to all areas or all citizens, but is mainly applicable to the Han population who lived in urban areas. This was because, first, the urban Han population accounted for about 90% of the total population (Bureau of Statistics, 2005), so the imposition of the one-child policy on them should result in reaching the birth-control goal quickly. Second, the enforcement of this policy could be more effective among the urban population because the government set up more family-planning centers in cities, which were used to ensure that female citizens of reproductive age were under the government’s surveillance (Sharping, 2003).

Furthermore, the strategies to enforce the one-child policy by successive post-Maoist governments before and after the 2000s were not identical. The governments after the 2000s adopted more incentive- orientated methods, while those in the 1980s and 1990s were mainly coercive and punishment-based. In the 1980s and 1990s, although the ban on abortion was lifted, the law did not stop some local family-planning centers from using abortion as a compulsory method of avoiding “unauthorized” births. While it is impossible to find out how many abortions per year in China were coercive in the 1980s and 1990s, the number is unlikely to be small, based on a report on abortion services in Guangdong province, which shows that in 1982, 80% of 624,000 abortions were carried out “by order” (Nie, 2005). While the post- Maoist abortion law, as mentioned earlier, does not impose a time limit, it does not endorse women’s rights to self-determination but facilitates the state’s utilization of abortion as a remedial method of reducing authorized births. The abortion law, along with the state’s one-child policy, conveys a message to the public that terminations of pregnancies at any stages of gestation are identical and necessary if they are performed on the grounds of lowering the population growth.

The adoption of more incentive-orientated strategies to enforce the one-child policy since the 2000s is mainly due to the fact that the demographic growth has been effectively lowered. The census statistics released by the National Bureau of Statistics show that the annual rate of population growth was 2.1% from 1954 to 1982 and only 0.57% from 2000 to 2010. While the state has changed its punishment-based strategies to more incentive-orientated ones, it has not endowed women with any substantial right to decision-making in relation to abortion. In the 1980s and 1990s, a large number of women were forced to terminate their wanted pregnancies because the state was in urgent need of lowering the demographic growth. Although this need has been greatly satisfied since the start of the 2000s, women’s health and lives are still endangered by the state’s imposition of medical and financial control.

As Nira (1997) has clearly observed, generally there are three main principles adopted by various regimes to manage their population figures: “people as power,” “eugenics,” and “Malthusianism” (p. 35). In brief, when a state’s population policy is based on the principle of “people as power,” its government has a strong need for people for a wide range of nationalist purposes, civil and military; when a state advocates the eugenicist discourse, its government’s concern is the “quality” of its population and it does not require more citizens but healthy citizens; when a state’s population policy is Malthusian, its government tends to use various means to reduce both its national birth rate and population. From the era of advocating the “people as power” principle to that of implementing the Malthusian strategy, the state has been imposing the burden of achieving its population objectives on female citizens by controlling their access to family-planning services. Although the regulatory models of abortion in the Maoist and post-Maoist governments look sharply distinguishable from each other, they are similar in the way that they treat women’s reproductive decision-making, namely that women’s needs for health and self-determination are marginalized and the state’s population goals are centralized. Thus, having a profound understanding of the state’s policy making in relation to population is essential for forming a thorough insight into the Chinese regulation of abortion. Its nature is still restrictive although the form looks liberal, because it allows the state to make reproductive decisions for female citizens. To further scrutinize the harmful effects on women caused by this nature, the following section offers an in-depth analysis of the practice of family planning in China, which helps the reader better understand the infringement of women’s health and reproductive rights under such a model.

The Chinese-style Practice of Family Planning: A Duty-orientated Right

The idea of family planning was officially introduced into the Chinese political and the legal systems at the start of the post-Maoist era. The introduction of this idea to China was significantly affected by Malthusian demographic theory (Lee & Wang, 1999). To justify implementing the strict birth-control policy, the government advocated a Malthusian argument: economic production cannot keep pace with population growth without family planning. Therefore, as discussed in the last section, in the post-Maoist era reducing the national birth rate was treated as essential to the development of the state’s economy and abortion was officially defined as a remedial method of practicing family planning. In 1980, the national birth-control policy was translated into national legislation: the Marriage Law 1980 (the Marriage Law), which states that a husband and his wife shall be under the obligation of obeying the policy of birth control. This obligation was quickly written into the Constitution, which states that while citizens of reproductive age have the right to reproduce or not to reproduce, they also have a duty to practice family planning. To understand the connection between the right (not) to reproduce and the requirement to fulfill the duty of birth control, the characteristics of Chinese quan (rights) thinking deserve a brief mention here. There are two characteristics of Chinese rights thinking which are different from those of human rights thinking in many other contexts. First, in China, citizens’ quan is believed to inhere in citizenship rather than in humanity (Edwards, Henkin, & Nathan, 1986); in other words, citizens’ exercise of rights is reliant on their fulfillment of relevant citizen obligations. Second, in the Chinese jurisdiction, citizens’ rights are granted by the state (Peerenboom, 1993), so the content of citizens’ rights can change depending on the state’s needs. With these two characteristics in mind, it is not difficult to understand that accessing family-planning services in accordance with the Constitution and the Marriage Law is more like performing a duty than exercising a right. In other words, to gain the right to abortion (and reproduce), women must first obey the state’s policy of reducing their fertility. In this way, the right to family planning in China is in fact duty- orientated. This is particularly true for women. While both husbands and wives should take equal responsibility for the birth-control obligation, in accordance with the Constitution and the Marriage Law, the reality is that this duty is mainly undertaken by wives. Since the start of the 1980s, the state has imposed the duty to take up family planning mainly on wives, and most of the compulsory birth-control methods have also been targeted at them. According to a survey conducted by the NHFPC in 1995, in more than 80% of the families studied only wives undertook contraceptive responsibility. The contraceptive means that were mostly used among the families that already had one or two children were female sterilization and intra-uterine devices (IUD) (Peng, 1997).

Furthermore, in the Chinese family-planning context, normally wives rather than husbands are kept under surveillance conducted by the NHFPC in order to keep birth-control programs running smoothly. To enable women to effectively undertake birth-control duties, the NHFPC formed a vertical structure in 1981: downward from the NPFP to province, city, district (urban) or county (rural), street or township, and neighborhood and village family-planning centers. At the beginning of the 1990s, there were an estimated 300,000 family-planning officials and hundreds of thousands of part-time family-planning workers in villages who were called cadres (Hemminki, Wu, Cao, & Viisainen, 2005). Generally, from the onset of the program to the present, a high-level family-planning center, such as a typical city-based one, sets a target of reducing the birth rate to a certain point for those centers at lower levels, such as district family-planning centers. The target is usually set according to the number of married women of reproductive age in an area. If the family-planning centers at the lower levels meet the target, the cadres in that center can receive financial rewards. Family-planning centers at the grass roots level directly guide and supervise individual women’s practice of controlling their birth rate. To meet the target and to avoid unauthorized births, the cadres in a local family-planning center can check and record detailed information about local married women of reproductive age, give birth permission to pregnant women if their pregnancy is authorized in accordance with the central government’s population policy, and persuade or even force married women to use an IUD after giving birth to one or two children. By establishing family- planning centers at different levels, post-Maoist governments have been able to monitor whether and how married women fulfill the duty of avoiding unauthorized births against the state’s birth-control policy. Children who are born without birth permission will be treated differently from those who have been authorized. For example, they might not be able to be registered in the local household system or gain an ID card until their parents pay the fines (Hemminki, Wu, Cao, & Viisainen, 2005).

Additionally, the content of the duty-orientated right to family planning does not remain certain and stable, because it can be changed by the state. For example, to exercise this right, women have to bear and rear more children when the state is short of labor, but when it needs fewer consumers women are required to fulfill the duty of lowering their fertility. This uncertain and unstable right leaves adequate space for the state to exert its discretion over family-planning services. As discussed earlier, to what extent women can access abortion is not determined by their decision-making but by the state’s policy goals. The state’s entrenchment of control over abortion services puts women, particularly those who are socioeconomically disadvantaged, in a powerless position from which they are deprived of the capacity to manage their own reproductive biology and daily lives.

Conclusion and Suggestions

The discussion provided in this paper suggested that the argument that the Chinese regulation of abortion is the most liberal regime should be carefully investigated through a feminist lens. Specifically, the feminist analytical approach was applied in this paper to examine three points: first, the access barriers against women who need abortion, second, the effects on women produced by the state’s policy making in relation to population, and third, the Chinese-style practice of family planning. By doing so, this paper argued that the regulatory model of abortion ought to move beyond a liberal form and to be brought into line with the principle of respect for women’s rights to health and to reproductive decision-making. Furthermore, by scrutinizing the Chinese abortion law, this paper also attempted to remind feminists to be wary of the fact that the law in an unrestrictive form could endorse values or ideas that are in fact antithetical to women’s interests.

First, in the Chinese family-planning context, the model of abortion regulation is significantly reliant on the state’s policy making in relation to population figures. Women therefore have to subject their decision- making to the state’s demographic objectives. Currently, the state’s imposition of comparatively fewer limits on abortion is due to the desire to facilitate its use of abortion as a backup method of avoiding “unauthorized” births. The Chinese-style practice of family-planning means that access to abortion could be a compulsory duty for women if they cannot afford fines for having authorized births. This not only causes gender inequality for women, but also produces social class injustice for women from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds. While law in the Chinese family-planning context allows women who want to end their pregnancies to do so, it may also force those women who desire to continue wanted pregnancies to abort.

To reduce the state’s control over abortion services, I suggest that the national legislation on abortion should be completely independent from the state’s policy making in relation to population. To do so, first, the state should enact new legislation to regulate abortion rather than including the regulation of abortion in the Code on Population and Family Planning 2002. Second, the law ought to ensure that doctors must obtain women’s informed consent for termination of their pregnancies. Meanwhile, the state should adopt more incentive-based and softer approaches to carrying out its population policy, such as increasing allowances for small families and promoting contraceptives. Third, due to the control over access to public funding for abortion, unmarried women who cannot afford legal services are left no choice but to obtain clandestine and unsafe procedures. As access to decent termination services is essential to protecting women’s rights to health and citizens’ marital status does not make their right to health less important, the state should ensure that financial support is equally available to married and unmarried women. Fourth, the state imposes medical limits through constructing the role of doctors as the state’s agents or the gatekeepers of abortion services. This makes access to abortion unnecessarily complicated and difficult. To treat women’s reproductive health and rights more seriously, the state ought to remove the legal restriction of abortion to registered doctors only and to promote the provision of abortion services in undeveloped areas where medical resources are limited. More importantly, the state should enhance the availability of adequate medical support. To do so, it can legislate to ensure that performance of abortion is only subject to women’s informed consent. Moreover, the law should clearly define the obligations of medical professionals in carrying out abortion services, for instance, the duty to provide accurate and nondirective information and competent advice.

While making these proposals for law reform, I emphasize that feminists should not overestimate the usefulness of replacing “old” and “bad” laws with “new” and “good” ones in establishing an ideal regulatory system that automatically satisfies women’s needs for reproductive health and decision-making. Feminists should beware of the “siren call of law” (Smart, 1989, p. 160), which is defined by Smart as being a problem in that although feminists try to be critical of existing regulations, they can also be seduced by law and attempt to use new or more laws to improve old laws. The usefulness of any legal reform may be limited because “once enacted, legislation is in the hands of individuals and agencies far removed from the values and politics of the women’s movement” (Smart, 1989, p. 164). This is also the main reason why laws concerning reproduction that appear to be gender-neutral often disappoint women’s hopes in practice. However, investigating law and making reform proposals should not only be targeted at perfect law. Since law is also a system of knowledge as well as a system of rules, challenging law can formulate and disqualify certain truths and discourses that are in fact opposite to women’s welfare. This paper served this purpose by attempting to shape alternative understandings and visions of how abortion ought to be regulated and what kind of regulatory model can be truly regarded as liberal.

Acknowledgments

* This work is supported by the MOE (Ministry of Education in China) Project of Humanities and Social Sciences (project no. 13YJC820002).

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