Premarital Sexuality,Abortion,and Intergenerational Dynamics in China

Abstract

This article uses premarital abortion(s) as a window to examine diverse parental roles in adult unmarried daughters’ intimate lives in post-socialist China. It also addresses issues of premarital sex, premarital pregnancy, and the emergence of a dating culture. The article identifies four patterns of parent–adult daughter interactions during the decision-making process of premarital abortion: no recognizable parental role, referencing perceived parental views, consulting parents, and direct parental pressure to terminate pregnancy. The findings suggest that within the context of a mature dating culture in urban China and the prevalence of premarital sex, adult daughters have achieved considerable control over decisions about sex and intimacy. Nevertheless, many women have continued to consider parental views on their marriage and reproduction as crucial. Some women have even prioritized the preferences of their parents over those of their intimate partners because they consider intergenerational ties more enduring and reliable than ties between intimate partners.

Keywords

family sexuality abortion intergenerational relationships reproduction China

This article uses premarital abortion as a window to examine intergenerational dynamics in post-reform China. It also addresses issues of premarital sex, premarital pregnancy, and the emergence of a dating culture. Scholars have shown that premarital sex, premarital pregnancy, and premarital abortion are common in post-reform China. A nationwide survey carried out in 2010 showed that 22.4 percent of young people aged between 15 and 24 years had sexual experiences; among them, 21.3 percent had experienced at least one unintended pregnancy, and the proportion of women choosing abortion was around 90 percent (Zheng and Chen, 2010). Data from the National Health and Family Planning Commission showed that over the past few years unmarried women have accounted for an increasing proportion of the 13 million abortions conducted annually in China.¹ A systematic review by Qian, Tang, and Garner (2004) suggested that in urban areas, 11–55 percent of unmarried women in eight cities experienced abortion, and 86–96 percent chose termination after becoming pregnant. Wu and Qiu (2010) estimated that 47.5 percent of a sample of 39,820 women who had undergone at least one pregnancy termination were younger than 25 years. According to Cheng and colleagues (2004), 33 percent of a sample of 4,547 unmarried women seeking an abortion reported having had one previous abortion. Moreover, abortion was particularly prevalent among the migrant population (He et al., 2012; Tang et al., 2011; Zheng et al., 2001).

The prevalence of premarital abortion observed after the 2000s must be viewed within China’s historical context to understand the novelty and unusual nature of the phenomenon. Although there was no legal restriction on abortion in China until the late Qing and Republican period (Luk, 1977), and despite the relaxation of the regulation on abortion since the mid-1950s (Tien, 1987), premarital sex, premarital pregnancy, and premarital abortion were still considered taboos throughout most of China’s history. During the Cultural Revolution, romance, passion, and sexual relations were regarded by the authorities as indulgence in “individualistic” and “bourgeois” love that was politically and ideologically reactionary; individuals who violated socialist sexual mores were denounced and punished (Evans, 1997). Sexual immorality was a frequently used accusation, especially against women, to legitimize political attacks; women were subjected to verbal humiliation, such as being called “broken shoe” or “whore,” and might even face physical violence (Diamant, 2000). Romantic liaisons among sent-down youth were condemned as a distraction from work; unmarried individuals who were involved in premarital pregnancy would be removed from their working positions and sent to reform camps (Honig, 2003). Chinese sociologist Li Yinhe, in her monumental book investigating the sexuality of Chinese women, recorded a few stories of premarital abortions during the Cultural Revolution. These included a 23-year-old unmarried and pregnant woman who was too frightened to go to a hospital and tried to induce an abortion by hitting herself and taking abortifacients. Another educated and unmarried woman felt like “the sky is falling” when she found out that she was pregnant. She used a fake name and a fake work unit to have an abortion in a hospital. Li argues that it was much more stressful for unmarried than for married women to have an abortion during the socialist era due to the sexually conservative environment (Li, 1998). Even in the first decade of the post-Mao era, a mature dating culture had still not been developed in China (Xu and Whyte, 1990), and most of the sexually active unmarried women had sex with their fiancés (Parish, Laumann, and Mojola, 2007).

However, China’s market reforms and opening up gradually ignited a more liberal sexual culture in the 1980s and onward (Choi and Luo, 2016; Ho et al., 2018; Honig and Hershatter, 1988; Kong, 2016). At the same time, the one-child policy, which made contraceptives and abortion readily available, had the unintended consequence of greatly reducing the restrictions on nonmarital sex (Pan, 2006: 29–30). Research by Farrer (2002, 2014) in the 2000s showed that in cosmopolitan cities such as Shanghai, premarital sexual activities were common, and sex was neither confined within marriage nor restricted to procreation.

Nonetheless, research also shows that contrary to what Lesthaeghe and van de Kaa (1986) have claimed, China has not been completely swept into a “second demographic transition” (Raymo et al., 2015). In particular, births outside of marriage have remained extremely rare in comparison to other societies.² This may be because unmarried women are having sex with men they plan to marry and they just proceed to marriage should they become pregnant. It may also be because unmarried women just terminate their pregnancies. This article focuses on the second group of women. In particular, it examines the different roles parents play in their unmarried daughter’s decision to terminate her pregnancy. This specific focus is grounded on our data, which suggest the intriguing roles Chinese parents may assume in their unmarried daughters’ intimate lives and abortion decision-making process. It echoes past research findings that, despite an increase in individual control over their intimate lives, parents’ influence on their adult children’s intimate lives and marriage decisions has remained significant in many instances (Davis and Friedman, 2014; Davis and Harrell, 1993; Parish and Whyte, 1978; Xu and Whyte, 1990; Whyte, 1997; Yan, 2003). Our data reveal four patterns of intergenerational interaction over reproductive decisions and illustrate the nuances in the seeming increase of adult daughters’ control and power over their intimate lives in urban China. Abortion decisions are complicated and involve many factors aside from parental influence. These other factors include government restrictions on single mothers’ registration of children born out of wedlock, the difficulties in gaining access to social welfare for these children, the social stigma attached to single motherhood and illegitimacy, women’s assessment of their material and psychological readiness for marriage and childbearing, and the intimate partner’s attitude. It is clear that parental views are just one of these factors; they are, however, factors that many women we interviewed consistently addressed in their accounts and hence are a window for us to gain a glimpse of the intergenerational dynamics in the intimate lives of women in urban China.

Premarital Sexuality, Abortion, and Intergenerational Dynamics in China

Research on abortion in post-socialist China has tended to address it under the one-child policy and often focuses on sex-selective and involuntary abortion among married women as a result of the state’s authoritarian measures (Banister, 1987; Greenhalgh, 2008; Greenhalgh and Winckler, 2005; Nie, 2010). Other studies on abortion have mostly been conducted by public health scholars, who focus on factors such as sexual knowledge and contraceptive use. Although this body of research has made an important contribution, it has overlooked the sociocultural factors and interpersonal dynamics leading to the decision to end premarital pregnancies through abortion.

Research on abortion decisions in the West has explored factors such as life planning (Aiken, Dillaway, and Mevs-Korff, 2015), the relationship context and partner attributes (Sassler, Miller, and Favinger, 2009), family background (Cooksey, 1990), and community acceptance (Butler, 2002). Western literature often highlights the role of significant others, such as parents, partner, and peers, in female teenagers’ decision making about an unplanned pregnancy. In particular, parents may exert influence at several stages of pregnancy and alter or reinforce the reproductive preferences of female adolescents (Henshaw and Kost, 1992), whereas adult daughters usually make reproductive choices by considering personal and relational factors instead of parental preference (Sassler, Miller, and Favinger, 2009).

In Chinese societies, on the other hand, parents have traditionally played a significant role in the intimate decisions of their adult children. Although modernization and economic reforms have weakened parental authority and increased the power of adult children in these matters, recent studies show that parents still play an important role in their adult children’s decisions about marriage, childbearing, and divorce (Choi and Luo, 2016; Choi and Peng, 2016; Whyte, 2005). At the same time, studies have also documented that adult children, particularly adult daughters, have achieved greater control, status, and power within the family (Fong, 2006; Gaetano, 2008; Ling, 2017; Yan, 2006; Zhang and Sun, 2014). Together, these studies paint a complex picture of evolving parent–adult daughter interaction in post-socialist China. On the one hand, rural-to-urban migration, rapid urbanization, new laws defining marriage as an individual matter, and nascent discourses of sexuality, love, and intimacy from the West have considerably undermined the ideological basis and legitimacy of parental intervention in their adult progenies’ intimate lives. On the other, scholars argue that economic insecurity resulting from market reform, privatization of marriage, housing shortages in urban areas, the one-child policy, and parental financial and emotional investment in adult children may have resulted in the “reverticalization” of kinship ties (Davis, 2016) and the increased importance of the parents-children axis in family relations (Yan, 2016a).

The Research Site

The study was conducted in a rapidly modernizing coastal city (hereafter T-City) in eastern China.³ T-City is among the fourteen coastal cities opened up to overseas investment in 1984; since then, it has become an important economic hub. In 2017, the city’s total annual GDP was around 1,000 billion yuan, in which primary, secondary, and tertiary industry account for 3.4, 41.2, and 55.4 percent, respectively. T-City is not only an industrial center that has prospered from foreign and locally invested manufactories, such as in the electronics and textile industries, it is also one of the important ports on China’s east coast. The amount of foreign capital invested in the city exceeded seven billion US dollars in 2017. T-City is also a popular vacation destination, boasting a great variety of entertainment venues, tourist attractions, shopping malls, cafés, karaoke studios, nightclubs, and bars. Given its favorable geographic location, vibrant city life, natural scenery, and rapidly developing infrastructure, as well as historical and commercial connections between foreign countries such as Japan and South Korea, T-City is a culturally dynamic magnet for international investors, traders, tourists, and students looking for opportunities and amusements, and is also a popular destination for intra- and inter-provincial migrants seeking a better life.

Our data consist of participant observations and in-depth interviews carried out during four field trips between 2013 and 2015. The respondents were mainly recruited in two sites: one was a registered community clinic located in the commercial center and touristic area in T-City. The clinic offered health care services mainly for women, including gynecological examinations and surgical and medical abortions, in addition to low-cost or free contraceptives for both women and men. Most women who came to the clinic were working in the service sector. The other site was a local hospital in a more remote industrial area of the city; most of the women patients in this hospital were factory workers living nearby. In total, 54 women, who had experienced a total of 120 premarital abortions, were interviewed (see Table 1). Our unit of analysis was the parental role in an abortion decision, not the parental role in a particular woman’s abortion history. This is because intergenerational interactions might differ over a given woman’s decisions about different abortions. Among the 34 women who had had more than one abortion, 21 reported no changes in the intergenerational dynamics across their multiple abortions, whereas 13 reported changes in the patterns of parent-daughter interaction in each separate abortion. These changes might be due to different circumstances during each woman’s life course. For example, some women did not consider involving their parents when they had no intention to marry, but when they started to consider marriage, they thought it necessary to consult their parents or they referenced perceived parental expectations (for details, see the next sections).

Table 1.

Number of Abortion(s) (N = 120) Experienced by the Respondents.

Number of abortions	Number of women	Column percentage
1	20	37
2	18	33
3	9	17
4	3	6
5	2	4
6	0	0
7	1	2
8	1	2
Total	54	100

In view of the sensitivity of the topic, potential respondents were first approached by medical staff and then introduced to the first author. Those who were interested in participating in the study were then given clear explanations of the aims and procedures of the research, and their informed consent obtained.⁴ The interviews were semi-structured and lasted between 45 minutes and 3 hours. Topics addressed included work, family, intimate relationships and abortion experiences, as well as thoughts on love, marriage, sex, childrearing, abortion, family formation, and future ambitions. All interviews were transcribed verbatim, coded line by line and analyzed by the two authors to identify emerging themes related to abortion decisions (Strauss and Corbin, 1998). The two authors wrote the article together.

Eleven of the respondents were local residents of T-City with urban hukou; 4 came from the rural area of T-City and did not have an urban hukou; 23 were intra-provincial migrants and 16 were inter-provincial migrants without a local hukou. The mean age of our respondents at the time of the interviews was 24.9 years. Around 36.7 percent of the respondents had attained an educational level of college or beyond, 34.2 percent had an upper middle school qualification, and 27.5 percent and 1.6 percent had a lower middle school and primary school education, respectively. The educational level of our respondents was higher than that of women in the same province and in the same age range nationally. According to the 2015 Chinese General Social Survey, in the province where T-City is located the percentages of the highest level of education attained by women for primary, lower middle school, high school, and college level or above was 12.1, 23.1, 30.8, and 27.5 percent, respectively; the 2010 Population Census showed that the percentages of women who completed college level or above in the age ranges of 20–24 and 25–29 years were 30.2 percent and 19 percent, respectively (National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2012). At the time of our interviews, 39 respondents were working in the service sector, 12 were working in the manufacturing sector, 1 was a student, and 2 were unemployed. Around 72.2 percent of our respondents were working in the service sector, which is higher than that of all women in T-City, where 49.5 percent of employed women were working in the tertiary sector in 2016, according to official data released by the T-City government. Nonetheless, the monthly income of our respondents, which ranged from 1,000 yuan to over 10,000 yuan and with a median income of 3,500 yuan, was lower than the national average for employed persons in urban units who, according to the National Bureau of Statistics of China, earned on average approximately 5,169 yuan monthly in 2015. The average monthly income in T-City was around 4,900 yuan in 2016, according to T-City’s official statistics. This income difference was perhaps due to the gender wage gap and income inequalities between local and migrant workers, with our sample including a high number of migrant workers.

The average age at first instance of sexual intercourse was 19.5 years. The lowest age at first abortion was 16 years, and the mean age at first abortion was 20.9 years. In T-City, the rate of births complying with the state’s family planning law was over 99 percent in 2016; a survey conducted in T-City showed that 95 percent of female migrants chose abortion to resolve an unintended pregnancy, which is compatible with the rates indicated in surveys conducted in other cities (Qian, Tang, and Garner, 2004). Only 4 (7.4 percent) women in our sample reported that they used a contraceptive during sex “every time,” and 24 (44.4 percent) said they “often” used contraception. Twelve (22.2 percent) and ten (18.5 percent) women revealed that they “sometimes” or “seldom” used contraceptives, and four (7.4 percent) had “never” used any kind of contraception. Most women preferred coitus-dependent methods, such as condoms (75.9 percent) or withdrawal (66.7 percent), rather than hormonal methods, including morning-after pills (35.2 percent), contraceptive pills (7.4 percent), and intrauterine devices (3.1 percent). Some women also used the rhythm method (48.1 percent). All the women in our sample had easy access to safe and affordable abortion services. The women who received abortions at the community clinic encountered no stigma at all during the process, but some women were confronted by judgmental comments when they obtained an abortion from a public hospital. In 117 of the 120 instances of abortion, the abortion was performed in licensed clinics or hospitals by registered medical workers. In only three instances did women induce their abortions themselves at their homes or workplaces by using abortion pills. The cost of abortion ranged from 1,200 to 8,000 yuan (US$175 to US$1,168) and 100 to 300 yuan (US$15 to US$44) for surgical and medical abortions respectively. The clinic and hospital also offered post-abortion health checkups. Some of the women who had experienced multiple abortions underwent the procedures in different facilities; others obtained abortion(s) in the same registered community clinic where we recruited our respondents. These women considered the clinic a trustworthy institution that offered professional and confidential services.

Contraceptives are easily accessible in T-City and can be bought in supermarkets, convenience stores, and sex shops, or they can be obtained for free in subdistrict offices. The choices of contraceptives were affected not only by the amount of sexual knowledge of the couple but also by relational and sociocultural dynamics. None of the women we interviewed had ever been forced by their partner to perform unsafe sex, yet twenty women reported that their partner disliked using condoms. Forty-five women admitted that their use of condoms was inconsistent and that they sometimes practiced skin-to-skin sex to satisfy their partner’s and their own relational and sexual needs. These women considered skin-to-skin intimacy not only a way to satisfy their sexual desires but also a way to help cultivate or signify a strong bond between them and their partners. A few women said they stopped using condoms when they considered their partner trustworthy and their relationship stable. Concerning the low rate of use of contraceptive pills, a considerable number of women shared a sense of folk skepticism about pills, believing that “all medicines are somewhat poisonous” 是药三分毒 and perceived pills as an unnatural substance that might intrude and harm one’s body. They were afraid that taking contraceptive pills might lead to weight gain, depression, and infertility, and thus preferred coitus-dependent methods.

Parent-Daughter Interactions Regarding Abortion Decisions

Women’s narratives suggested that premarital abortion was a complex decision that was influenced by their assessment of their financial situation, familial arrangements, legal constraints, and relational concerns, as Ying explained,⁵

I considered many things: my economic situation, my reputation and my parents. . . . Some people give birth before marriage; that’s improper. Very likely, I would cause my parents to lose face. . . . If you have a child after marriage, it will be recognized by the state and it will be taken care of, entitled to social welfare, and enjoy everything. But if your child is born out of wedlock, he gets nothing. You’ll also lose face with your relatives. (Ying, 31 years old, salesperson, migrant)

Ying considered marriage as the normative precondition for procreation. She realized that premarital pregnancy was not only against state and provincial regulations,⁶ it was also socially stigmatized. She saw herself as having few options: she could give birth to the child and abandon it or she could terminate the pregnancy; alternatively, she could have a shotgun wedding 奉子成婚. It is estimated that post-conception marriage accounted for a quarter of first marriages in China in the 1960s, with the proportion continuing to increase in the 1970s and the 1980s. However, it then declined significantly in the 1990s and 2000s (Ma and Rizzi, 2017). If Ying decided against a shotgun wedding and chose to be a single mother, she feared that she would bring shame on herself and her parents, as well as having to cope with financial hardship and being the mother of an unregistered child. Ying was well aware that children born out of wedlock were not entitled to household registration unless their parents paid the state-required social maintenance fee.

Even though abortions have been easily and widely accessible in China for several decades, the practice remains stigmatized. In his work, Jing-Bao Nie (2005) points out that, in terms of Confucian moral principles and traditions, a fetus is perceived as a life before birth, and thus abortion is regarded as unacceptable and ethically wrong if performed without substantial justification. For example, abortion to save a woman’s life has been considered acceptable. Even so, Nie argues that Confucian thinking concerns itself more with the conditions that can morally justify abortion, rather than upholding an abstract universal principle to oppose it (Nie, 2005: 89). This pragmatism provides ethical leverage for justifying abortion and lessens the possibility of condemnation experienced by individuals. More importantly, the implementation of the one-child policy has made abortion less controversial and has reduced stigmatization in China compared to some places in the West where there is religious opposition to abortion or to societies where abortion is criminalized, banned, or heavily restricted (Rigdon, 1996). In these societies, abortion is often placed at the center of political and moral controversies; it is sometimes regarded by religious groups or anti-abortionists as “murder,” or killing of an “unborn child,” and women who have had an abortion often experience stigmatization (Dillon, 1996; Gürsoy, 1996; Hessini, 2007; Kulczycki, 1995; Oaks, 2003; Remennick and Segal, 2001; Shahawy and Diamond, 2018; Solinger, 1998). Having said this, the practice of abortion in China is still stigmatized.

This is particularly the case when it comes to premarital abortion, which is largely associated with female sexual promiscuity and impaired fertility. For example, women who have premarital abortions may sometimes be mocked with derogatory terms such as “broken shoe” 破鞋 or “non-virgin broken-shoe” 非处破鞋,” implying that they lack sexual purity/marriageable desirability due to lost virginity/sexual promiscuity. In other words, social stigma against premarital abortion in China does not center on the act of abortion itself, but on the circumstances around which women engage in sex. Perhaps for this reason, all our respondents felt a considerable amount of social pressure to hide their premarital pregnancy and abortion. In general, they preferred to keep their abortions confidential. Forty-six women had concealed their abortions from family, partners, friends, and colleagues, and only ten women ever revealed their past abortion(s) to their subsequent partners. For example, Chu never told her partners about her past abortions, saying, “Why should I tell them? Men are mental neat freaks 精神洁癖 . . . . I don’t want other people to get a handle on me.” The term “mental neat freaks” implies that men value women’s fidelity, virginity, or an “uncontaminated body.” Abortion, which contradicts these expectations, may become a sore point that may undermine a woman’s reputation and status in a relationship, or may hinder her prospects of finding a future partner. Like Chu, most of the women interviewed kept their abortion(s) secret to avoid being the target of hateful gossip and to preserve their reputation in the eyes of their partner and family.

Before we elaborate on the heterogeneity of parental influence on women’s premarital abortion decisions, we will briefly address the role of their intimate partners. Most of the women we interviewed informed their partners about the pregnancy and involved them in making decisions, yet four women had concealed their pregnancy from their partners to retain full control over their reproductive choices. In 36 percent of the 120 cases of abortion, both the female and male partners preferred to terminate the pregnancy. Our respondents suggested that the male partner’s rejection of childrearing responsibility would lead directly to an abortion; in 4 percent and 3 percent of the 120 abortions, the women wanted, or were open to, the option of continuing a pregnancy, respectively, but their male partner preferred not to. In 28 percent of the cases, even if the male partner was willing to get married and support a child, the women still chose abortion, often out of financial and parental concerns. In 3 percent of the cases, the male partner was not informed about the pregnancy; in 7 percent of the cases the male partner was informed but reacted ambiguously. In 17 percent of the cases, the women did not report their partner’s preference. In all the cases, the women reported having the final say regardless of their male partner’s view on an abortion. Although the male partner did not have the final say, many of them took care of the women during the abortion and post-abortion stages. For example, in 67 of the 120 abortions, the women were accompanied by their partners when they underwent their abortion; in 72 abortions the male partners offered post-abortion care; another eight and two women, respectively, reported that they were looked after by their relatives and friends after their abortions.

Our analysis of the women’s narratives suggests there are four main types of parent–adult daughter interaction with respect to premarital abortion decisions. Table 2 summarizes the key features of these four interaction patterns.

Table 2.

Types of Intergenerational Interaction over Premarital Abortion Decisions (N = 120).

	No recognizable parental role	Referencing perceived parental views	Consulting parents	Direct parental pressure to terminate
Number of cases	69	33	16	2
Key characteristics of intergenerational interaction	Parents played no recognizable role in the decision about abortion. The daughter did not inform her parents of the pregnancy and made her own decision, probably because in most cases the pregnancy occurred in a casual or short-term intimate relationship.	Parents’ opinions indirectly influenced the decision about abortion. In many cases, the woman did not inform her parents about the pregnancy, but her decision to terminate was influenced by perceived parental views on her marriage.	The woman consulted and discussed her decision with her parents; however, she retained autonomy with respect to the final decision to terminate the pregnancy.	Parents intervened directly in the woman’s decisions about marriage and termination. The woman’s resistance to parental opinion was often in vain and she eventually gave in and followed her parents’ preference.

No Recognizable Parental Role (69 Cases)

As Table 2 shows, a high number of premarital abortions took place without recognizable parental involvement in the decision, as the women prevented their parents from knowing or becoming involved. Most of the cases of multiple abortions fell into this category, within which two migrants had four abortions; two migrants had five abortions; one migrant and one local had seven and eight abortions, respectively. These pregnancies occurred mainly in casual, or what our respondents described as “non-marriage-oriented relationships”; or the women had never considered marriage at the time of pregnancy. The women usually decided to abort at the time when the pregnancy was confirmed. Huang dated about ten men and had four abortions before her marriage. She did not consult or inform her parents about these abortions because she had not considered having a child with the men responsible:

Most of them were lovers. . . . I didn’t want to marry them, nor did they want to marry me. . . . None of them said they wanted it [the baby]; it was also impossible for me to keep it. These relationships were unstable. (Huang, 29 years old, salesperson, migrant)

Feng, a migrant worker from northeast China, had been in several relationships, but only told her mother about one partner whom she dated for six years. Since the end of that relationship, Feng had not talked about her boyfriends or her abortion decisions with her parents. She explained,

I don’t have a stable boyfriend. . . . If I dated one, we’d break up after two to three months; it’s just that no relationship lasted over a year. That’s why I didn’t let my family know. If my parents ask whether I have a boyfriend or not, I’ll say no, I always say no. . . . If today I tell them I’ve found a boyfriend, after a while they’d ask me again, and if I say we’ve broken up, what would they think of me? [Pretending to be her parents, she says:] “Why do you always behave like that? Find someone then break up, find someone then break up!” I don’t want to tell them. (Feng, 29 years old, unemployed, migrant)

Huang and Feng chose not to inform their parents about their many relationships because they wanted to retain control of their dating and did not want to be judged by their parents. Since they reckoned that there was no need to inform their parents about their relationships, they also rationalized that it was not necessary to “disturb” their parents about their pregnancies. The women considered that revealing their relationships and pregnancies to their parents might cause needless worry and even make themselves appear to be “improper” 不检点 in the eyes of their parents, as shown from the potential reactions described by Feng. The stories of Huang and Feng illustrate the increasing fluidity and casual nature of romance and sexual intimacy in contemporary China. Between 1985 and 2000, the predominance of sexual relations among unmarried women occurred among those with a known or possible fiancé (Parish, Laumann, and Mojola, 2007). As a Chinese dating culture has emerged and matured, along with rapid urbanization, large-scale internal migration, and increasing contacts with international communities, young Chinese adults have had more opportunities to explore various patterns of intimacy, including short-term sexual adventures and “ambiguous relationships” that involve emotional or sexual ties (Farrer, 2014). On the one hand, the emergence of more diverse and fluid sexual relations signifies the delinking of sex from marriage and procreation; on the other hand, the reluctance of women to continue their pregnancy in “non-marriage-oriented” and/or casual relationships suggests that childbearing is still tied to marriage.

Referencing Perceived Parental Views (33 Cases)

In a quarter of the cases of premarital abortion, the woman, although not informing her parents about her pregnancy, took her parents’ views about a marital partner for their daughter into consideration when making the decision to terminate the pregnancy (see Table 2). We conceptualized this as “referencing perceived parental views,” as the women used parental views as a frame of reference when making decisions about how to handle their premarital pregnancy. Abortions in this category occurred mostly in the context of a stable relationship; some of the couples had even considered getting married. For example, when Yan became pregnant, she and her partner had been hoping to get married. She introduced her partner to her parents but concealed her pregnancy. Her parents disliked her partner because he came from a different province and they considered his home region too distant from their own. Yan tried to convince her parents that this was not an insurmountable problem. Although she succeeded in obtaining her father’s approval, her mother’s opposition effectively prevented her from marrying her partner and led to her decision to terminate her pregnancy:

My mom thought that she wouldn’t see her dear daughter anymore if she married a man from a faraway region. She cried every day till her eyes got blurred. Then I gave in. I thought: I only have one dad and one mom; how many years can I spend with them? But I can always find another boyfriend. Therefore, I tried to break up with him [and decided to have an abortion]. (Yan, 26 years old, part-time online salesperson, migrant)

Yan’s story illustrates that her decision to have an abortion was based on her parents’ wishes, views, concerns, worries, and emotional reactions toward her plan to marry her partner. Although her parents did not know about her pregnancy, their opposition to her marrying her partner had resulted indirectly in her decision to terminate the pregnancy.

Some women made the decision to terminate their premarital pregnancy because they anticipated that their intimate partner would not meet their parents’ expectations of a future son-in-law. For example, Pei, a college-graduate laboratory assistant who had migrated to T-City for work and dated her partner for over a year, decided to have an abortion when she learned about her pregnancy. Although her partner had always wanted to marry her, Pei thought he did not meet her parents’ standard for a future husband. Pei believed that her parents thought that her future husband should have what they considered a satisfactory education and a socioeconomic status that was as good as or better than her own. Pei’s partner was a salesperson with a high school diploma and a rural background. Pei visited his village once and was shocked by his impoverished home. As she told us: “If I tell my mother about his family’s situation, she’ll definitely say, [using a high-pitched voice to imitate her mother] ‘How come you stay with a guy like this?’” (Pei, 26 years old, laboratory assistant, migrant).

The stories of Yan, Pei, and other women in similar situations suggest that there is a paradoxical element to young women’s control over their intimate lives in post-socialist China. On the one hand, these women have engaged in various kinds of romantic relationships without parental hindrance. On the other, their decisions about premarital abortion are still partly driven by their perception of their parents’ wishes concerning their future spouses. These women may even prioritize their parents’ views and go against the wishes of their intimate partners, as Jing’s story illustrates. Jing met her partner after migrating from Anhui province to T-City. When they found out that she was pregnant, the couple wanted to get married. Jing then told her parents about her plan to marry her partner. Her father was worried because Jing and her partner did not come from the same province and her father considered the distance between the two families too great:

When they heard that I wanted to marry someone in a place so far away from home, they didn’t say no, just told me to think carefully. . . .⁷ If we have children, we need to take good care of them, and I may not be able to go home to look after my parents even if they’re sick. I discussed my parents’ concerns with my partner, and he said, “We can give money to your brothers to look after your parents.” But I told him, “money is useless.” You don’t need to spend even a dollar if you’re with your parents and that in itself would give them comfort. No matter how much money you spend, if you’re not close by, their hearts will be empty.

Jing’s father did not explicitly oppose her marriage, and gave her the freedom to decide, but he subtly expressed his worries and implicit dislike of her plan to get married. To avoid hurting her parents, Jing decided not to rush into marriage before getting her parents’ approval. She changed her mind and decided to terminate her pregnancy:

I decided not to have this baby. My partner cried when he heard about my decision. He begged me not to abort our baby as he would miss it. I said we could have another baby in the future. Now we have no choice; we need to first settle the worries of my parents, then we can get married, right? (Jing, 23 years old, factory worker, migrant)

Jing not only felt obliged to consult her parents about her marriage plan; ultimately, she prioritized their wishes over those of her partner. She believed that a happy marriage required her parents’ endorsement and support, and it was essential to obtain their approval before getting married and having children. In addition to a sense of filial obligation, the decisions made by women in this category were driven by their close emotional bond with their parents. Scholars argue that the one-child policy increased parents’ willingness to cultivate an emotional attachment with their daughters and hope for future old-age support (Zhang, 2007; Zhang, 2009). Findings from previous studies also show that daughters expect to play an active, hands-on role in providing care for their elderly parents in the future (Li, Feldman, and Jin, 2004; Shi, 2009; Xie and Zhu, 2009; Zhang, 2007), resonating with the experiences of Yan, Jing, and other women in this study.

Consulting Parents (16 Cases)

In 16 abortion cases, the women consulted their parents before making their decisions. These cases often occurred in the context of a marriage-oriented relationship (13 cases) and this meant that the women felt obliged to inform their parents about their pregnancy, particularly if they were considering carrying the pregnancy to term. The parents would express their views but give their daughter the freedom to make her own decision and respect her choice. For example, Jun initially wanted to continue her pregnancy but later chose abortion because she believed that the medicines she took during the first month of the pregnancy had endangered the fetus. She discussed with her mother her change of heart and persuaded her mother to accept her decision: “My mother wanted me to carry it to term, but then she heard about the medicine issue.” Although her mother was distressed by Jun’s decision, she supported it and accompanied Jun to the clinic for the termination. As Jun said: “After all, it is my life, my child.” Jun described her relationship with her mother as an equal and supportive one:

Before I was eighteen years old, they treated me as their responsibility; since I turned eighteen . . . I’m the one who makes the final decisions [about my life]. My mother and I are like friends. (Jun, 28 years old, online private banking agent, local)

Ling chose an abortion and was able to convince her mother to support her decision: “My mother said, if I wanted it [the baby], she would help take care of my child, but if I didn’t want it, she would respect my choice. She listened to me.” Although Ling’s mother initially wanted Ling to carry the pregnancy to term, she eventually gave in as she accepted Ling’s concern about the lack of childcare options:

My mother told me, this was my first child, and she wanted me to have it. I also wanted it, but there was no way out. Our parents are working, and we are working too. How can you just find a nanny to take care of your baby? This would be worrying. My mother was then convinced by me. (Ling, 20 years old, salesperson, migrant)

While Jun and Ling succeeded in persuading their parents to accept their decision to have an abortion, Yun took her parents’ opinion into account and changed her mind. Yun wanted to carry her pregnancy to term and her partner supported her decision; however, her parents warned her about the potential health risk to the baby because of her and her partner’s unhealthy lifestyles: “My partner always goes out socializing, and I go drinking with my friends. He smokes, and I smoke too. I also need to work the night shift.” Yun’s parents urged her to rethink her plan to carry the pregnancy to term: “My parents were afraid the child would be unhealthy. . . . What would we do if the child was born with cerebral palsy? Would we deal with it or abandon it?” (Yun, 22 years old, karaoke bar receptionist, migrant). Although in the end Yun listened to her parents’ advice to terminate her pregnancy, she conceded that it was her own decision.

Jun, Ling, Yun, and the other women in this category reckoned that their parents had no power over their decision about whether or not to terminate a premarital pregnancy. The control adult daughters enjoyed in these matters can be attributed to the changing status of daughters in Chinese families in the past few decades. As other scholars have argued, as a consequence of family planning programs and the decline in fertility rates, daughters have become more precious to parents (Zhang, 2007; Zhang, 2009), and a more balanced recognition of sons and daughters has appeared among some urban, rural, and migrant families (Choi and Peng, 2016; Fong, 2006; Ling, 2017; Zhang, 2005). The rise in women’s socioeconomic status and financial capacity (Tsui and Rich, 2002) has further prompted parents to reevaluate the value of daughters. The notion of “friend” appeared in the women’s accounts, and parent-daughter dialogues regarding intimate and reproductive matters also echoed what Evans (2010) described as intergenerational and gendered “communicative intimacy” in post-socialist China.

Direct Parental Pressure to Terminate (2 Cases)

Two instances of abortion in our sample fell into this category. Although the parents were unable to control their daughters’ choice of dating partners and with whom their daughters had intercourse, they had nonetheless asserted their authority to intervene in their choice of spouse and plans for marriage, and eventually had coerced them to have abortions. The cases of Tong and Yi demonstrate this type of parental domination. Tong, a native of Hebei province, met her partner after she migrated to T-City for work. Their relationship encountered strong opposition from her parents because her hometown was too far away from that of her partner. Her family also disapproved of their relationship because they considered her too young to get married and thought the age gap between her and her partner was too large. Tong’s parents eventually ordered her to move in with them so that they could monitor her daily life and dissuade her from continuing the relationship:

When I had a call, or a QQ [an instant messaging software service] notification, my mom would ask, “Are you talking to him again? Are you calling him again?” She didn’t ask me to break up with him, but she said, “You two should have less contact.” In the beginning, my mother told me, “You’re too young to get married. Let’s see, just give him some tests, he is many years older than you are. Can he wait for you?” . . . Then a year passed, we were still together, and my mother changed her tactics again. . . . She became stricter, she even confiscated my ID card, my mobile phone, and then my mobile card. (Tong, 22 years old, beautician, migrant)

Home detention and confiscation of her personal effects caused Tong to rebel. She ran away with her partner. She became pregnant a few months later. She then informed her parents about her pregnancy, hoping that in view of the pregnancy they would approve her plan to marry her partner. Instead, she faced even fiercer opposition from her parents, who visited her residence and took her to have an abortion. After the termination they took her back home and forced her to break up with her partner.

Yi was working in T-City as an animator and had been cohabitating with her partner for more than two years. Her parents opposed their relationship as they thought her boyfriend, a taxi driver, would never be able to provide her with a comfortable life. At first, the couple planned to get pregnant and force her parents to approve their plan to get married. To Yi’s surprise, rather than approving, her parents ordered her to have an abortion after learning of her pregnancy: “My parents were mad [after being told that she was pregnant] and asked me to abort the child. I felt so hurt” (Yi, 24 years old, animator, migrant).

Rather than immediately falling in with their parents’ wishes, the two women initially resisted their parents’ intervention. They refused to end their relationship with the man with whom they had conceived, lied about their intimate life, and ran away from home with their partner. Nevertheless, their resistance did not change the minds of their parents and eventually both women gave in to their parents’ wishes. Although both Tong and Yi had achieved financial independence through paid employment at the time of their abortions, they were relatively young, lacking in social experience, and remained dependent on their parents for advice and support. In addition, their parents formed alliances with other family members to increase the pressure on them. For example, Tong’s parents sought the support of her brother to press her into ending her relationship with her boyfriend. Emotional dependence and the affective value Tong and Yi placed on their family networks motivated them eventually to give in to their parents’ wishes in order to maintain harmonious familial relationships (see also Choi and Luo, 2016; Riley, 1994).

Conclusion

This article uses premarital abortion, a commonly practiced yet little studied phenomenon, as a window to examine the complexity and nuances of intergenerational dynamics in post-socialist China. Our findings have several implications. First, they suggest that women in urban China have achieved considerable control over their sexuality and reproductive decisions. The prevalence of premarital sex and abortions that took place without recognizable parental involvement evidences this, as do the cases in which women actively chose whether or not to consult their parents about their pregnancies or convinced their parents and partner to support their reproductive decisions. The agency women exercised is probably related to their economic independence, their migration from rural to urban areas and hence their being away from constant parental surveillance, and their access to relatively safe and affordable abortion facilities, an unintended consequence of the one-child policy. However, one must be careful not to overestimate the extent of women’s agency and control over their intimate lives. The very fact that a considerable number of women we interviewed (45 out of 54) said that they did not always use condoms in sexual intercourse because they wanted to please their partners may alert us to the continued salience of patriarchal dominance in some core aspects of intimate relationships, although the power of male partners is far from total and may even appear malleable.

Second, our findings suggest that despite the general increase in individual sexual freedom in urban China, a considerable number of parents have continued to exert influence on their adult daughters’ intimate lives, particularly in the latter’s choice of marital partners. This observation resonates with recent discussions on the “reverticalization” of kinship ties and family loyalties in China. Deborah Davis (2016) argues that the privatization of the institution of marriage induced by successive legal reforms, the “4-2-1” family structure created by the one-child policy, and the decline in the state’s support for housing and welfare has “(re)verticalized” parent–adult child ties, overwhelming the “horizontal” conjugal bonds between engaged or married couples in urban China. Similarly, Yunxiang Yan (2016a, 2016b) also calls attention to the rise of neo-familism in contemporary China, which is marked by intergenerational intimacy and the increasing importance of the parent-child axis in family relations. Focusing on the issue of premarital abortion, this article provides further evidence of the continued significance of the parent–adult daughter tie in post-reform China that is driven by the desire of intergenerational intimacy and the need for greater parent-child interdependence. For example, some of the women we interviewed perceived the parent-daughter bond to be more profound, stable, and trustworthy than their relationship with their partner.

Third, our findings demonstrate the delinking of sex from marriage and the sustained tie between marriage and childbearing. The stories of the women we interviewed illustrate a Chinese dating culture that increasingly involves love-based sexual intimacy, cohabitation, and short-term premarital sexual relationships. However, the decoupling of sex from marriage and childbearing has not meant the untying of marriage and childbearing, as has occurred in many Western societies. It was this strong link between childbearing and marriage that had prompted the women in our study to terminate their premarital pregnancies. Although the focus of this article is on parental influence, we note that both daughters and their parents made their decisions within a particular social context. As our respondents suggested, decisions to terminate a pregnancy were often made after taking into consideration societal norms that stigmatized premarital sex and premarital pregnancy, and structural constraints imposed on single mothers. For example, the majority of the women in this study hid their abortion history from their parents, partners, and acquaintances to protect their reputation and marriage prospects, because premarital abortion is stigmatized and is often associated with promiscuity and a damaged reproductive capacity. With regard to structural constraints, female migrants, in particular, felt that they had very few options to resolve an unplanned pregnancy because they occupied a disadvantaged position in the urban labor market and lacked an urban household registration, and hence had no access to a range of state-sponsored welfare benefits for themselves and their children. For other women, considerations about whether they had sufficient resources to form and raise a family, and concerns about their ability to balance care responsibilities with work demands in a labor market that offers little support to workers with care responsibilities, often prompted them to terminate their pregnancy.

All in all, the findings illustrate the complex and nuanced parent-daughter relationships concerning adult daughters’ intimate lives and reproductive decisions. They also illustrate the emergence of a dating culture in urban China and the prevalence of premarital sex, pregnancy and abortion—topics that have been little explored by China scholars. Despite these contributions, our findings should be interpreted with caution because of the small sample size and the way the respondents were recruited. Given that premarital abortion has remained a sensitive topic in China, we relied on health care institutions to help recruit the respondents. We recruited respondents from two field sites situated in the urban and industrial areas of T-City. We ensured that our sample covered locals, and intra- and inter-provincial migrants. These sampling strategies helped us maintain a degree of diversity in the sample. The comparison of the sociodemographic profiles of our respondents with the general population in T-City suggests that the findings reported in this article may reflect more the experiences of women in the service sector or women who are labor migrants. In particular, migration may influence intergenerational interactions over premarital abortion because women from rural and urban areas may hold different attitudes toward parental roles in their intimate lives. When we compared the distribution of the four patterns of intergenerational interaction by migration status, we found that local women are more likely than migrant women to have no recognizable parental role in their abortion decisions (74.2 percent of cases of abortions by local women compared with 51.7 percent of cases involving migrant women). Local women are also more likely to have consulted their parents about their abortion decisions compared with migrant women (19.4 percent of cases of abortions by local women as compared with 11.2 percent by migrant women). On the other hand, migrant women are more likely than local women to reference perceived parental views when making abortion decisions (34.8 percent of cases of abortion by migrant women versus 6.5 percent by local women). Finally, the two cases of direct parental interference in the abortion decision involved migrant women. Given our small sample size, these comparisons should not be overinterpreted. To further examine the impact of migration on parental roles in intimate matters, future studies would require a larger sample size.

Since the primary goal of this study is to understand factors shaping the decision-making process leading to premarital abortion, we drew our sample from women who had undergone at least one instance of premarital abortion. To understand fully why some unmarried women choose to carry their pregnancy to term while others choose abortion, future studies would need a different research design and recruit respondents from women who have had shotgun weddings.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the participants in our study, who generously assisted our fieldwork and willingly shared their stories and experiences with us. We would also like to thank the three anonymous referees for giving us insightful and constructive comments that have helped improve our work.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research was supported by the Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme received by the first author.

Notes

Author Biographies

Ruby Y. S. Lai is a research assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy, Lingnan University. Her research interests include gender, family, reproduction, and China and Hong Kong studies. She is currently working on a book about premarital sexuality and abortion in China.

Susanne Y. P. Choi is a professor of sociology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include gender, family, and migration. Her book Masculine Compromise: Migration, Family, and Gender in China (coauthored by Yinni Peng) was published by University of California Press in 2016. She is currently working on a book about the migration of Chinese homosexuals.

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