‘Get Pregnant’: Chinese Authorities’ ‘Policy’ For Newlyweds Sparks Debate, Report Says

In a Weibo post, a user shared the experience of a colleague who said an official called her to say the government 'wants newlyweds to be pregnant within a year'. The post was taken down within hours.

Newlyweds in China are reportedly getting calls from government officials asking if they are pregnant, or when they plan to be if not yet. An online post describing a newlywed’s experience of receiving such a call went viral Thursday before it was taken down along with the tens of thousands of comments it had received, news agency Reuters reported. The post sparked a debate, with many netizens sharing that they too had received similar calls.

This comes close on the heels of President Xi Jinping’s declaration at the recently concluded 20th Congress of the Communist Party that China would put in place a policy to boost the country’s birth rates and improve its population development strategy.

In the post on Chinese social networking site Weibo, a user named 'lost shuyushou' shared the experience of a colleague who had received a call from the Nanjing city government's women's health service asking if she was pregnant, the Reuters report said.

Quoting the colleague, the post said an official told her that the government "wants newlyweds to be pregnant within a year and their target is to make a phone call every quarter".

The report said the Nanjing municipal government and the National Health Commission did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The Weibo post was deleted a few hours after it went live.

'Take the time to have a baby'

Before it was taken down, the post on Weibo had garnered thousands of comments, one of which was by a woman who said she got married in August 2021, and her local government had since called her twice, the Reuters report said. She said the first call was about if she was preparing to conceive and if she was taking folic acid. When the second call came, she was asked if she was pregnant already.

The woman said the official told her: "You are married, why are you still not preparing for pregnancy? Take the time to have a baby". 

China, the world’s most populated country for a long time now, had a strict one-child policy in place from 1980 to 2015. Its population, however, is now on the brink of shrinking and China sees it as a crisis in terms of care for its elderly, the report noted. According to latest data, new births are set to drop below 10 million from 10.6 million in 2021, after an 11.5% slide in 2020.