TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) – Sarah Gao had a busy job. As the head of a 500 million yuan ($ 76.8 million) investment fund, she constantly flew across China on business trips. Then she found out she was pregnant.
Her pregnancy, with her then boyfriend, was not planned. But Gao, who was 40, thought she would have no more chances and decided to keep the baby. What she didn’t realize was how that decision would lead to a nearly four-year legal battle over her maternity benefits.
Her protracted struggle highlights the consequences that Chinese women face when raising a child outside of marriage. The vast majority do not have access to public benefits, ranging from paid maternity leave to prenatal exam coverage, as their status is in a legal gray zone. Some can even be fined.
Gao and some other single mothers want to change this. They are part of a small group, organized by Advocates for Diverse Family Network, that petitioned the Legal Committee of the National People’s Congress at the recently concluded annual meeting. They do not expect immediate action, but they hope that their needs will be reflected in the legislative agenda in the future.
The Chinese population is aging rapidly and the government is keen to promote higher birth rates and ease restrictive family planning laws by 2015 so that each family can have two children. Still, the laws regarding single parents have not changed that quickly.
There are no official statistics on the number of single-parent families in China, but a 2014 National Health Commission study estimated there would be nearly 20 million single mothers by 2020. nearly doubling from 2009 to 2018, according to the Department of Civil Affairs.
After a difficult pregnancy, Gao gave birth to her daughter in November 2016. After seven months of sick leave and maternity leave, she returned to work. During her sick leave, her company, KunYuan Asset Management, paid her the bare minimum: about 1,000 yuan ($ 153) per month, a huge drop from her usual monthly salary of 30,000 yuan ($ 4,606). The company did not pay her while on maternity leave.
Gao urged the company to provide full salary and maternity leave benefits, some of which would come from the social insurance to which companies legally contribute.
In Beijing, where Gao lives, an employee can only apply for those public benefits through his company. But Gao’s company declined to apply for her, saying her materials were incomplete because she didn’t have a marriage license.
When she enforced the matter, the company asked her to resign. Gao at first refused to quit, but she was eventually fired. However, the company refused to send her a formal letter confirming her departure, making it difficult for her to find a new job.
The company did not respond to requests for comment via email, and calls to its Beijing headquarters went unanswered.
Gao is suing the company for 1 million yuan ($ 153,645) in back wages, in addition to her maternity leave allowance. She has lost in court twice since July 2017 and is appealing a third time.
Each time, the court said that “Gao’s unmarried status during childbirth is not in line with national policy, and therefore there was no legal basis for her to receive a salary while on maternity leave.”
China’s family planning policy does not explicitly prohibit unmarried women from having children, but says that “the state encourages husbands and wives to have two children.”
At the local level, this has been interpreted as meaning that only a married couple can have children. This becomes an obstacle in trying to access benefits such as prenatal visit compensation and maternity pay.
Many local governments require a marriage license during this process, said Dong Xiaoying, the founder of Advocates for Diverse Family Network.
There have been some changes. In Guangdong and Shanghai, governments have changed the regulations so that a woman does not have to prove that she is married before receiving benefits.
In January, Shanghai quietly passed a new ordinance that eliminated the need for a marriage license to apply for benefits and helped women like Zou Xiaoqi, a single mother turned activist in Shanghai. Zou sued a government agency in Shanghai in 2017 to get her maternity leave salary and the public insurance benefits. After years of media interviews, court appearances and lobbying city politicians, Zou received her benefits earlier this month.
The laws must change, says Zou, as the cultural stigma is still very intense. Only recently did she find out that the mother of her son’s playmate was also a single mother. They had known each other for five months before the woman revealed that detail.
“The direct impact is that there are some single mothers who are already facing major difficulties and are ending up in more difficult positions,” Zou said. “The indirect impact is that some people are afraid to speak up, and others are afraid to face society and will face a lot of oppression. People who do not want to get married eventually get married and enter into an unhappy marriage. “
Single mothers and activists hope that a change at the national level can smooth out the situation for single mothers in the rest of the country, such as Gao. A Guangdong delegate to the National People’s Congress said in February that the Family Planning Act may need some clarification to address the needs of single mothers, acknowledging their legal dilemma.
“I just want to know in national policy, as a single parent, as an unmarried woman, do I have the right to give birth?” Gao said.