Men's rights in family planning are for the first time clearly
stipulated in China's Population and Family Planning Law which came
into effect Sunday.
The law was adopted late last year at the 25th session of the
Standing Committee of the Ninth National People's Congress.
The new law stipulates that all citizens, regardless of gender,
have a right to have children of their own. Both men and women are
responsible for birth control and men will get legal support if
their partners have abortions without their consent.
The Law on Protection of Women's Rights, already in place for
years, says women in China are entitled to the right to have
children in accordance with state regulations and also have the
right not to have children.
But men's right to have children was not clearly defined. So when
disputes on the rights of reproduction came to courts, only the
Marriage Law and Civil Affairs Law were relevant.
"Chinese laws have never stripped men of their right to
reproduction," said Xu Anqi, an associate researcher with Shanghai
Academy of Social Sciences, who explained that the emphasis of
women's right to reproduction in law in the past was made in a bid
to protect women.
Sun Xiaoying, associate researcher with
Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Regional Academy of Social Sciences,
admitted women shouldered more responsibility and risks than men in
reproduction, including pregnancy, giving birth and breast feeding,
which can not be borne by men, but the past practice of entrusting
wives with the right to decide reproduction to some extent harmed
men's interests.
Zeng Qianghua, an official with the family planning committee of
Guangxi, said reproduction was a shared responsibility, so major
issues such as whether to have a child and whether to have an
abortion should be decided by both partners.
However, a woman surnamed Liu insisted reproduction was a private
matter, to be decided according to a couple's circumstances, so
consensus could not always be achieved.
"If husband and wife have not reached a consensus over
reproduction, then the wife's action to have an abortion on her own
would not constitute an infringement on the rights of her husband,"
said Liu.
With women's increasing independence and changing concepts of
parenthood, more Chinese women are choosing not to have
children.
Statistics show 10 percent of eligible men and women have chosen
not to have children in the Chinese capital, Beijing, and 600,000
families in the cities of Guangzhou, Beijing and Shanghai are
dinkies -- double income, no kids couples.
Song Jianping, a lawyer, believes there is always the possibility
that one partner of a dinky couple changes his or her mind and
wants a child, which might eventually land them in a reproductive
dispute.
China, with a population of 1.3 billion, is now among the countries
with the lowest birth rates in the world.
(Xinhua News
Agency September 1, 2002)