China’s birthrate is at a historical low. Chinese government officials are now doling out tax and housing credits, as well as educational benefits, and even as far as cash incentives to encourage women to have more babies.
These perks, however, are exclusively available to married couples, leaving single mothers completely out of the perks.
Being married in order to have children is a prerequisite becoming increasingly less appealing to independent women in China who would prefer to parent alone.
Single parents in China have long struggled to fight for social benefits like medical insurance and education for their babies. Women who are single and pregnant are regularly denied access to the country’s public health care and insurance that covers the maternity leave of women who are married. Women are not even protected legally if an employer fires them for being pregnant.
China’s national family planning policy does not explicitly say that unmarried women cannot have children. But it does come close to that.
China’s policy explicitly defines a mother as a married woman.
And it massively favors married mothers. Villages offer married couples cash bonuses for new babies. Many cities have expanded maternity leave, and they have added an extra month to mat leave for second and third-time married mothers.
But these perks are not doing very much to reverse the demographic crisis. This is especially the case in the face of a steadily declining marriage rate within the country, reaching a 36-year-low last year.
Last year authorities moved to scrap the use of “social support” fees, which is a type of financial penalty that single mothers are forced to pay to get benefits for their children. But some areas in the country have been slow to adopt the new rules, and regulations across the country vary because the enforcement is left up to the local governments.
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