A Chinese court has dismissed a rare legal challenge brought by a single woman in Beijing seeking the right to freeze her eggs.
The Chaoyang Intermediate People’s Court in Beijing said in a ruling that the hospital did not violate the woman’s rights by refusing to freeze her eggs.
Teresa Xu received the court ruling on Friday, nearly three years after she first filed the case.
Chinese law does not explicitly prohibit single people from services such as fertility treatments. They simply state that a “husband and wife” can have up to three children.
In practice, however, hospitals and other institutions implement the regulations in a way that requires people to show a marriage license.
Single women who choose to have children have struggled to access public benefits such as maternity leave or coverage of prenatal exams.
In 2018, Ms. Xu, then 30, had gone to Beijing Capital Medical University Hospital of Obstetrics and Gynecology, a public hospital, to inquire about freezing her eggs.
After an initial examination, he was told that he could not continue because he could not show the marriage certificate.
She said the doctor also urged her to have a child when she was still young.
Ms Xu says she plans to appeal the court’s decision. (AP: Ng Han Guan)
Rollback of women’s reproductive rights
Ms. Xu, who is not married, had wanted to keep her eggs, so she had the option of having children later.
“I think this lost lawsuit, it’s not an attack on the reproductive rights of single women, maybe it’s a temporary setback,” she said in a short video statement announcing the news on her WeChat account.
Ms. Xu’s case received extensive national media coverage in China, including some state media, when she first presented her case in court in 2019.
Local media had said his case against the hospital was the first in the country.
The hospital, according to the ruling, had argued that egg freezing carried certain health risks.
But he also said that delaying pregnancy would lead to “problems” such as risks to the mother during pregnancy and “psychological and social problems” if there was a large age gap between the parents and their child.
The hospital also said egg freezing services were only available to women who could not conceive naturally, and not to healthy patients.
Ms. Xu said she planned to appeal the ruling.
“Surely there will be one day [when] we will regain sovereignty over our own bodies,” he said.
AP