Why Have I Never Seen a Pregnant Chinese Woman?

Pregnant Chinese women are often subject to superstitions and beliefs that help them stay healthy and balanced throughout the pregnancy. These customs are based on the belief that health is achieved by maintaining a balance of Yin and Yang.

One of the most common taboos is that pregnant women should not be touched. This is thought to prevent the baby from being born with an illness or a defect.

2. They don’t want to have a baby.

In a society that still carries the weight of centuries of misogynistic thinking, many women don’t see children as their life’s purpose. Instead, they prioritize getting a good education, earning a high salary, buying a nice house and establishing social connections that will open doors to future opportunities.

Even in China’s rapidly urbanizing, upwardly mobile society, childbearing is a choice that has to be made by each woman herself. Despite Beijing’s efforts to encourage more babies, many young Chinese women simply don’t want children. The reasons vary, from the desire to achieve personal goals, to fears of a declining population and strained finances, to worries about how to care for an older generation.

For working women, childbearing is a significant career setback. Many women find that their bosses are unwilling to give them time off to take care of a sick or newborn child. Some have been sidelined, demoted or fired by employers for requesting maternity leave. Other women have discovered that taking time off from their high-stress jobs can put them at a disadvantage in the job market.

It’s also expensive to raise a child in China, particularly in the big cities. Childcare and after-school classes are expensive, and someone needs to spend time driving the kids to and from activities. In addition, the cost of a good education is prohibitive for middle class families.

In addition to the financial and career concerns, there are also cultural reasons why more Chinese women don’t want to have a baby. For one thing, it’s hard to resist the message drilled into adults of child bearing age that they should have a single child. For another, China’s culture of guanxi—the system in which relationships and connections are more important than merit—means that having more than one child could jeopardize the chances of future success.

3. They don’t want to be a mother.

For many Chinese women, having children isn’t a priority, even with the government offering incentives to encourage them to grow their families. They are wary of the sacrifices associated with parenthood, and want to focus on their careers or personal goals. These women, who were raised in small families and are only the first generation in their families to have a university degree, are also worried about the impact of childbearing on their physical health.

A slew of policies has been introduced in recent years to try to boost China’s low birth rate, including tax breaks, housing credits, and education benefits for single mothers. But these efforts have failed to convince women to have more babies. Many of them are fed up with the state’s interference in their bodies and are wary of the social pressure to have children.

Alison Sile Chen, a former editor of a magazine that focused on women’s rights in China, says that the one-child policy created an unbridgeable gap between Chinese women’s aspirations and their traditional gender roles. Women now have a stronger sense of their own autonomy and are more aware of the damage that childbirth can do to their physical health.

Women in China today have a better awareness of their rights, thanks to the rising advocacy against sexual harassment and workplace discrimination. Despite government censorship and surveillance, these movements have spread ideas of equality and helped Chinese women to become more confident in their own choices. They are also more conscious of the fact that their own choices can have a huge impact on others.

4. They don’t want to have kids.

The fact that many young Chinese women don’t want to have children has posed a huge challenge for the government, which is worried about a rapidly aging population. To get around this, it has launched a variety of incentives, including cash incentives to encourage couples to have second or third children and flexible working policies that allow women to delay childbirth or work part time.

But these efforts appear to be having little effect. Some experts believe that the government’s shift in rhetoric from seeing children as a problem to proclaiming the importance of procreation is damaging its credibility among many young people. In addition, a number of companies have been firing female employees for mentioning pregnancy, even though it is illegal to do so under labor laws. This has led to a widespread perception that employers are discriminating against pregnant women.

A popular meme, known as Never Seen a Pregnant Asian Woman or Asian Women Lay Eggs, has been spreading on Twitter and TikTok, with some Chinese feminists referring to it as “the chive’s awakening.” It argues that by refusing to reproduce, young women are taking back control over their bodies. “We are not letting ourselves be cut and regrowd,” reads one post on Reddit, where it first surfaced in 2018.

As for the government’s demand that women have more children, Feng Yuan, a veteran feminist who took part in the 1995 United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, says it is nothing new. She cites the forced sterilizations and late-term abortions during China’s decades-long one-child policy as evidence that the state has always tried to control women’s fertility.

While China’s millennials were raised in small families and given opportunities that previous generations of girls did not have, many women say that they don’t want to have children because they are not ready for the burdens that come with motherhood. Others say that they are worried about the rising cost of living and the lack of decent jobs, which make it hard to afford a family.

As a result, some women are opting for what is being called the DINK lifestyle, which stands for “dual income, no kids.” In this way, they are breaking with traditional markers of success, such as marriage and family, to create their own definition of happiness.