Until last year it was not really possible for most unmarried women to become mothers in China clinicafundadoresarmenia.com – practically speaking. But a social change is under way and it is driving shifts in policy too.
In her flat on the outskirts of Shanghai, Zhang Meili rocks her baby back and forth. As he gurgles away happily, she tells him that she’s going to head out soon to earn money for him.
After his mother goes to work, two-month-old Heng Heng will be looked after by his grandmother – who recently moved to China’s largest city to help her daughter raise her child.
That there is no father in Heng Heng’s life would be frowned upon by many in China, especially in more conservative rural and regional areas. The belief that a child should not be brought into this world without a mother and a father is still widely held here.
In Zhang Meili’s case, she says she was lucky to have moved to Shanghai to run a business because being a single mother in this mega-city is much more accepted.
“I’m grateful for the tolerance of Shanghai,” she says. “I’m from rural Henan, an area which would have a lot of discrimination against me as a single mother.”
She became a single mum after her boyfriend’s family rejected his choice of bride. They considered her position in society to be too modest.
So he broke up with her – even though she was pregnant with his child.
I ask her mother, Mrs Zhao, how she felt when she heard the news that her daughter, who is 25, would keep the baby.
“My feelings? I was heartbroken,” she says. “It’s very hard to raise a kid on your own. And, in our hometown, there would be criticism from neighbours.”
Have her feelings changed now that she’s a grandmother?
“Now I see him, I’m really happy,” she says with a huge smile on her face.
Zhang Meili has options that many unmarried women don’t have because she runs her own small business.
This gives her more independence and control over her life.
Though the little massage shop she runs is still struggling post-Covid, she doesn’t need to clear leave with an employer or battle for social acceptance in a workplace because she has given birth to a son who will be raised without his dad.
Of course, it has not been easy for Zhang Meili to keep her business afloat during such a rocky time economically, with the added challenges of giving birth, plus knowing that – while attitudes are changing – there are still those who will look down on her.
She says that none of her friends backed her decision to keep her child. They thought it would harm her chances of eventually finding a husband, and that it wasn’t right for the child to grow up without a father.
“When I was pregnant, I went to the hospital alone,” she says. “At the time, my shop was struggling to survive and, when I looked around, I did envy the women who went there with their husbands.
“But I chose to become a single mum. I chose to have him, and I needed to get over this.”
Yet it was not only people’s beliefs which made it very hard to become a single parent.
Before 2016, the government effectively prohibited this from happening by stopping officials from issuing birth approval certificates, without seeing proof of marriage for the father and mother.
Another problem had been the requirement for both parents’ ID details to be listed in order for a child to get a hukou – the identity document which all Chinese citizens need to, for example, enrol in school.
When I first came to China two decades ago, I recall unmarried women telling me that they would have no choice but to have an abortion if they became pregnant accidentally because a child could not survive in this country without all the required paperwork.
Even after these rules changed, it remained virtually impossible for most unmarried women to consider having a child until last year because they could not get access to the health insurance needed to pay for the hospital, or to paid maternity leave.
These two things have now supposedly changed but, in practice, an employer must apply on behalf of a staff member for the benefits to kick in – and some companies are still refusing to do it.
A lawyer working on cases in this field told us she had a client whose boss at a large franchise would not facilitate her getting access to paid maternity leave. Only after she sued the company did they agree to do it.
“It really depends on the openness of the company and the awareness of employers regarding the rights of their staff,” the lawyer said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “However local policies are actually vague and sometimes companies are operating in a grey zone here.”
Some bosses don’t understand that the regulations have changed, the lawyer added.
Others are not keeping their knowledge up to date because they simply don’t want to. They may consider single parenting to be wrong.