A few months after Lu Qiumei gave birth to her daughter in 2012, officials visited her home and told her she was required to be fitted with an intrauterine device (IUD).
For more than three decades, this was national policy in China. The devices was the government’s most important tool for limiting couples to one child, and almost all new mothers were required to get one.
Lu considered the demand invasive and potentially harmful to her health. Still, like hundreds of millions of Chinese women, she had one put in.
Now, a year after abandoning the one-child policy, the government is hoping to make it up to Lu and millions like her — by removing their devices for free. However, the offer — made without an apology — has provoked outrage.
“We shouldn’t even have had this in the first place, and now the government wants to use it as a form of state benefit for people,” 36-year-old Lu said. “It’s like they are slapping themselves in the face.”
While IUDs elsewhere can often be removed with the tug of their strings in a doctor’s office, surgery is usually needed in China because most devices are designed or altered to be more difficult to extract.
However, many Chinese women have chafed at the thought of the government getting involved, yet again, in their private lives, and for many mothers, the offer has come too late for them to consider having a second child.
China began demanding that women be fitted with the devices after they had one child, and sterilized after they had two, in the early 1980s. From 1980 to 2014, 324 million women were fitted with them, according to official statistics,
Last year, confronting an aging population and a shrinking workforce, Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) relegated the one-child policy to the Chinese Communist Party’s scrap heap of discarded dogma — pivoting from punishing couples for having a second child to encouraging them to get on with reproducing.
To that end, the government said 18 million women would be eligible for the free removal of the devices in the next three years so they could bear a second child.
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