“It’s good for me I wasn’t caught, but it’s lucky for them too. I was going to fight to the death if they found me.”-Wu Weiping, speaking about evading a government forced abortion when she was seven months pregnant.
While many contemporary citizens of China enjoy having greater personal incomes than ever before, largely due to the success of mainland business markets, when it comes to having babies, one per family is the maximum according to a government imposed limit.
What happens to parents who disregard the official statute? They are reportedly slapped with considerable monetary fines, sometimes detention, loss of jobs and income or other strict measures intended to punish.
Even so, manmade laws have never been known to curb human behavior and China’s ban on procreation does not seem to be any different. With the help of social media, a growing number of families have secretly defied the state’s two-child prohibition.
Everyday moms and dads
Parents in China who seek to have a second child do it at great personal risk. Ordinary residents are up against long established cultural traditions, various political pressures and history itself, in a battle for individual rights. Sound familiar? Can you say “Arab Spring” or “Occupy Wall Street?”
Like other protesters around the world, Chinese couples seeking to circumvent the ramifications of breaking the one-child law have organized by way of social media.
An Associated Press article “In China, a daring few challenge one-child limit,” published by Alexa Olesen on December 25, 2011, provides keen insight into the cyber efforts of some everyday moms and dads:
“Using Internet chat rooms and blogs, a few have begun airing their demands for a more liberal family planning policy and are hoping others will follow their lead.”
In a specific instance, Olesen explains, “After finding out his wife was expecting a second child, Liu Lianwen set up an online discussion group called ‘Free Birth’ to swap information about the one-child policy and how to get around it. In less than six months, it has attracted nearly 200 members.”
A similar story
Though poignant, the dilemma of the Lianwen family is not unique. One high school teacher, Wu Weiping, never expected to become pregnant after requiring fertility treatments to conceive her first child. After the treatments ended, Weiping was surprised to find out she was carrying another baby. As Olesen points out in her AP piece, Wu was not the only one who was shocked:
“The news triggered a month long ‘cold war’ with her husband. Silent dinners, cold shoulders. She wanted to keep the baby. He didn’t. After a few weeks, he came around, she explained with a satisfied smile. But family planning officials insisted on an abortion. The principal at her school also pressured her to end the pregnancy. Desperate, she went online for answers — and was led astray.”
The extent some families go through
According to the state’s family planning regulations, divorced parents can have a second child if one of the spouses is a first time parent. In order to take advantage of the exception, Weiping divorced her husband.
With his permission and help, she then married her younger single cousin. The solution was short lived. Officials directed her to have an abortion, since conception occurred before application for the marriage license to her cousin was made.
The choices
Currently in China there are only two options available to families who plan on having more than one child: running and hiding.
Weiping took flight to Shanghai where she had her baby in a secret location. When she was not with her real husband, Weiping communicated with him using cryptographically coded messages posted to an online journal. Eventually Chinese family planners caught up with Weiping and placed enormous “social compensation fees” on her which she is unable to pay.
Considering the circumstances of Wu Weiping and the other families in China who have exceeded the one-child rule, it seems human behavior cannot be stifled by decree or physical enforcement, no matter what the politics of the situation are.