Illegal births and legal abortions – the case of China

BACKGROUND: China has a national policy regulating the number of children that a woman is allowed to have. The central concept at the individual level application is "illegal pregnancy". The purpose of this article is to describe and problematicize the concept of illegal pregnancy and its use in practice. METHODS: Original texts and previous published and unpublished reports and statistics were used. RESULTS: By 1979 the Chinese population policy was clearly a policy of controlling population growth. For a pregnancy to be legal, it has to be defined as such according to the family-level eligibility rules, and in some places it has to be within the local quota. Enforcement of the policy has been pursued via the State Family Planning (FP) Commission and the Communist Party (CP), both of which have a functioning vertical structure down to the lowest administrative units. There are various incentives and disincentives for families to follow the policy. An extensive system has been created to keep the contraceptive use and pregnancy status of all married women at reproductive age under constant surveillance. In the early 1990s FP and CP officials were made personally responsible for meeting population targets. Since 1979, abortion has been available on request, and the ratio of legal abortions to birth increased in the 1980s and declined in the 1990s. Similar to what happens in other Asian countries with low fertility rates and higher esteem for boys, both national- and local-level data show that an unnaturally greater number of boys than girls are registered as having been born. CONCLUSION: Defining a pregnancy as "illegal" and carrying out the surveillance of individual women are phenomena unique in China, but this does not apply to other features of the policy. The moral judgment concerning the policy depends on the basic question of whether reproduction should be considered as an individual or social decision

How Far Has Fertility in China Really Declined?

According to births in the last year as reported in China's 2000 census, the total fertility rate (TFR) in the year 2000 in China was 1.22 children per woman. This estimate is widely considered to be too low, primarily because some women who had out-of-quota births according to China's one-child family policy did not report those births to the census enumerator. Analysis of fertility trends derived by applying the own-children method of fertility estimation to China's 1990 and 2000 censuses indicates that the true level of the TFR in 2000 was probably between 1.5 and 1.6 children per woman. A decomposition analysis of change in the TFR between 1990 and 2000, based on our best estimate of 1.59 for the TFR in 2000, indicates that about two-fifths of the decline in the conventional TFR between 1990 and 2000 is accounted for by later marriage and less marriage, and three-fifths by declining fertility within marriage. The analysis also applies the birth history reconstruction method of fertility estimation to the two censuses, yielding an alternative set of fertility estimates that are compared with the set derived by the own-children method. The analysis also includes estimates of trends in fertility by urban/rural residence, education, ethnicity, and migration status. Over time, fertility has declined sharply within all categories of these characteristics, indicating that the one-child policy has had large across-the-board effects. Copyright 2005 The Population Council, Inc..