President of the Hangzhou Chinese Medicine Association, Vice President of the City Famous Chinese Medicine Research Institute, Zhang Qin submitted a proposal to the ongoing Third Session of the 14th Zhejiang Provincial People’s Congress. The proposal advocates for the orderly relaxation of restrictions on egg freezing, allowing healthy unmarried women to freeze their eggs for the purpose of optimizing or preserving fertility.
She believes that the proportion of primiparous women over 30 has increased from 15% forty years ago to 51%. Women who miss the optimal reproductive period experience a decline in physical fitness when they wish to conceive. Meanwhile, the incidence of ovarian reserve decline has risen from 19% to 26%, with a particularly noticeable upward trend in the past two years, severely affecting women’s reproductive health. Additionally, the number of infertility patients is increasing year by year, indicating a growing demand for healthy eggs. As assisted reproductive technologies mature, various issues such as egg buying and selling, gender selection, and surrogacy have emerged, making legislation, regulation, and penalties urgent.
In response to this situation, her suggestion is to have women of reproductive age extract and freeze their eggs while young, to be thawed when they wish to conceive, and to establish an egg bank. This would facilitate the transfer of “egg resources” between provinces and cities.
As the first city in China to change its capitalist policies, Shanghai. Member of the CPPCC Chen Fangyuan submitted a proposal during the Shanghai Two Sessions to pilot the opening of healthy unmarried women’s “egg freezing” in Pudong New Area. The reason Chen Fangyuan gave is similar to that of the Hangzhou representative: she also believes that women’s reproductive age is continuously delayed. Data shows that in 2023, the average age of first childbirth among registered female residents was 31.66 years, and the average age of childbirth was 32.56 years.
Chen Fangyuan further stated that age is the most critical factor determining women’s reproductive function; after 32, women’s fertility declines further, and after 37, it drops sharply. Therefore, she believes that currently, many women delay childbirth for work, economic reasons, and other subjective factors. Implementing healthy unmarried women’s “egg freezing” can help improve fertility.
Regarding assisted reproductive technologies and surrogacy, which are directly related to egg freezing, Chen Fangyuan added: “China explicitly prohibits the use of assisted reproductive technology for surrogacy and other illegal activities. This should continue to be strictly enforced after the conditional opening of single women’s elective oocyte cryopreservation. At the same time, excessive commercial promotion should be banned, and medical institutions should be prohibited from commercial advertising aimed at profit from ‘egg freezing.’ The use of egg freezing should be strictly regulated with clear indications.”
While Zhejiang’s approach to “egg freezing” remains at the proposal stage, Shanghai, as the first city to implement capitalist policy changes, is already preparing for policy implementation.
These officials and experts seem to repeatedly claim they are “considering women’s health and fertility,” but do these policies truly benefit women? In reality, the emergence of legal egg freezing policies will only increase the legal sources of eggs used as raw materials for surrogacy and baby production, without increasing the number of children in impoverished families unable to raise children.
In modern Chinese society, “extremes are wealth accumulation on one side and poverty, slavery, labor exploitation, etc., on the other.” According to data from the China National Bureau of Statistics’ China Statistical Yearbook 2022, China has 1.22 billion people with monthly incomes below 5,000 RMB, accounting for about 86.7% of the total population. However, according to China International Finance Co., Ltd. 2022 statistics, the top 1% of the population owns 36.7% of the country’s total wealth, while the 1.3 billion people only hold 3.79%.
Under such social conditions, nearly 90% of the population will only become providers of uteruses and eggs in the surrogacy industry. Driven by economic hardship, many impoverished women are forced to sell their bodies and organs to obtain compensation that cannot make up for their losses.
Only a tenth of those with the financial means to purchase reproductive services are willing to spend tens of thousands to over a hundred thousand yuan, employing impoverished women to sell their bodies and eggs.
This industry and phenomenon are merely reflections of the bourgeois exploitation of the proletariat in the field of reproduction.
Since 2010, China’s capitalist society has coexisted with the surrogacy industry for over a decade, proving that Chen Fangyuan’s calls for banning commercialization are just empty words.
Less than two months after the Hefei surrogacy agency incident on December 13, 2024, women often become “voluntary” egg donors due to work and economic pressures, used by surrogacy and egg extraction agencies as mere egg-laying tools. The involved hospitals are “legitimate,” and the agencies are “legally” established enterprises. Even after the birth of surrogacy babies, they receive “legal” birth certificates. The entire surrogacy and egg extraction operation has become a complete baby production industry chain.
In 2024, surrogacy clinics were exposed in cities including Shanghai, Qingdao, Hefei, and Shenzhen. The price of a baby ranged from hundreds of thousands to several hundred thousand yuan.
In the Qingdao surrogacy case, a woman who was forced by life to serve as a surrogate and egg donor said she had been doing this for many years, “just selling eggs more than ten times.”
Relying on such business matchmaking, intermediaries who profit from surrogates and egg sellers openly said: “Don’t worry, surrogates definitely won’t keep the child because there’s no blood relation, and they can’t afford to raise the child either.” This is a direct reflection of the financially capable oppressing the impoverished.
Furthermore, the “egg freezing” policies prioritized in Zhejiang, Shanghai, and other regions, along with declining birth rates in these areas, reveal that impoverished people are unable to have children, while the wealthy spend money to have children, increasing demand for eggs. Egg freezing itself costs tens of thousands of yuan, which impoverished workers cannot afford in today’s worsening economic conditions. Poor people cannot afford it, so these policy changes essentially serve the reproductive needs of the rich.
Reproductive issues are social issues. Only through social movements can they be solved. Only by addressing the current situation where women are reduced to wage slaves and domestic slaves, and by changing the social structure where a small elite controls most of the wealth while the majority must sell their labor or bodies to survive, can the decline in population be reversed. The current downward trend in society’s population cannot be reversed by the bourgeoisie’s “more children, more blessings” ideology alone. Only by overthrowing capitalism and rebuilding socialism can this problem be solved.
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】 浙江两会丨代表建议逐步、适当放开冻卵限制，探索建立卵子库_长三角政商_澎湃新闻-The Paper
【】12·13 Hefei Surrogacy Agency Incident_Baidu Encyclopedia
【】 两会之声｜委员建议在浦东试点“单身女性冻卵”，严格把控适应证_浦江头条_澎湃新闻-The Paper