Media revelations that mothers in Dongguan, Guangdong Province were forced to have intrauterine device (IUD) inserted in order to obtain hukou, household residence permits, for their new-born babies aroused public outrage recently. A group of 13 female lawyers from nine cities such as Beijing and Shenzhen submitted a joint letter to the Ministry of Public Security and the National Population and Family Planning Commission, protesting at the lack of respect for women and their right to choose.
Many see it as ridiculous that placement of an IUD was made into a precondition for hukou registration. In fact, combining family planning with household registration is not a fresh move.
I remembered in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, women in my hometown were often required to have tubal ligation after the number of their kids reached the limit set by the family planning policy.
Those parents who had children outside the birth plan were either not permitted to have their kids' household registered or had to get the hukou for their kids by paying a considerable fine.
Therefore, if a family's first child was a girl, they usually didn't register her but hid the girl and reserved the hukou for her possible future younger brother.
From the perspective of local governments, it is understandable that they'll try some measures to carry out the family planning policy.
The Dongguan government issued a regulation on population and family planning management in June 2003, in which the article 1 clearly states the purpose of the regulation is to effectively control population growth rate, improve quality of the population, and promote economic sustainable development and social progress.
The article 24 states that relevant family planning authorities should protect women's health and create favorable conditions to guide couples to adopt contraceptive measures of their own will. And it further regulates that women of childbearing age who already have a child should be encouraged to have the placement of an IUD as the first consideration to prevent pregnancy.
Looking at the regulation and its articles, we find there is nothing ridiculous at all. The government has adopted legislation to legitimate its governance as a result of improvement of the awareness of the rule of law.
However, the problem is when the local governments implement the family planning policy, they are used to adding their own considerations and understandings, which could not only make their work easier but also help them boast of their performance.
For example, they emphasize those visible targets regulated by the family planning policy such as controlling the population growth rate, while selectively and deliberately ignoring those targets that are hard to qualify, like improving quality of the population, protecting the rights of women and children and promoting social progress.
Under such ways of thinking, no wonder the local governments could come up with a policy combining the population policy with the hukou policy and a blithe disregard for the sanctity of women's bodies, leading to their ridicule by the public.
If the local governments set different and more meaningful priorities, we wouldn't see such ridiculous policies.
The problem is not just the methods they adopt, but their misplaced values and their distorted ideas of public service.
The author is a lawyer based in Shanghai. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn