Jilin Woman Lobbies to Loosen Laws on Freezing Human Eggs

A woman from the northeastern province of Jilin has asked members of China’s top legislature who represent her home province to support a national law that would allow single women access to egg-freezing technology.

Zhan Yingying, a 29-year old office worker who told Caixin that she has no plans to get married, wants to have her eggs frozen in order to have a baby in the future if she so chooses. But unmarried women can have their eggs frozen only in Jilin or overseas, as single women are legally barred from doing so elsewhere under national and local rules. Even in Jilin, women seeking the procedure often face obstacles because of the contradictory national and provincial laws.

Zhan said she has sent letters to all 64 of Jilin’s deputies in the National People’s Congress that asked them to support introducing a national law to allow unmarried women to freeze their eggs.

Signatures from an entire regional NPC delegation or a group of at least 30 NPC deputies from various regions can ensure a new law or government regulation is introduced in the legislature.

The cryopreservation of unfertilized eggs is off-limits to single women under various government regulations and national laws, including China’s Population and Family Planning Law, last revised in 2016.

The technology was legalized for single women in Jilin under a regulation passed by the standing committee of the provincial legislature late in September 2002.

There are no official statistics on how many unmarried women in Jilin have frozen their eggs. But although the procedure is legal in the province, many women have complained that they have hit roadblocks when they sought access to the service.

A Jilin woman who gave only her surname, Ma, told Caixin that she was denied access to egg-freezing technology at four local medical facilities, including the First Affiliated Hospital of Jilin University, in 2016 on the grounds that she was not married at the time.

The technology made national headlines in 2015 when renowned director and actress Xu Jinglei, who is unmarried, revealed in an interview with Vista magazine that she had nine of her eggs frozen in 2013 when she was 39 years old.

Meanwhile, the demand for egg-freezing services in Hong Kong or in foreign countries from single Chinese women has reportedly been on the rise in recent years.

Zhan’s call for new legislation comes as Chinese women are increasingly getting married later in their lives, and as fewer women are choosing to have multiple children.

Chinese women were getting married at the average age of 24.9 years old in 2010, up from 23.4 five years before. In Shanghai, women entered their first marriages at the age of 28.14 years old on average in 2014, according to the city’s Civil Affairs Bureau.

The average number of children per Chinese woman of child-bearing age is between 1.4 and 1.6, below the internationally accepted level of 2.1 children, according to Dr. Huang Wenzheng, a demographer at Johns Hopkins University in the U.S. state of Maryland.

About 630,000 fewer babies were born in China last year than the year before though the country ended its decades-long one-child policy at the beginning of 2016.

Contact reporter Li Rongde (rongdeli@caixin.com)