One Child (28 page)

In the fall, a kink in their plans. The state of California initiated drastic budget cuts, and Krywokulsky’s husband was laid off. Jiang, in France on a two-month work stint, offered to fly to San Francisco to comfort Krywokulsky. She had lost her insurance, so Jiang paid for coverage under COBRA, the pricey program that allows the recently unemployed to continue receiving health coverage. It cost over $600 monthly. At this point, Krywokulsky was five months pregnant.

The baby was born in December 2010, on the first day of sunshine after a week of rain. Jennifer held Krywokulsky’s hand during the vaginal birth, which went easily and quickly. “I think I pushed three times,” said Krywokulsky.

Everybody cried: the Jiangs, Krywokulsky, her mother, “even the nurse was tearing up,” said Krywokulsky.

One year later, the Jiangs began to think about trying for another baby. “You look at the one-baby family in China. A lot of kids don’t know how to share, they get extremely bored and indulged by grandparents,” said Jiang. They still had several frozen embryos in storage. They approached Krywokulsky again, and she agreed.

This time, things were different. Krywokulsky’s son was now old enough to ask questions. “I told him, ‘Mommy’s having a baby for someone else,’” said Krywokulsky. As it turned out, she was having two. The twins were born prematurely, one month ahead of schedule. Jiang’s insurance coverage didn’t kick in so early. Uninsured, he was billed about $10,000 for every day the twins spent in intensive care. In the end, the hospital bill came to a stunning $280,000, though Jiang was able to negotiate it down to $220,000 for an immediate cash settlement. Now Jiang advises his clients who are expecting twins to purchase coverage for premature births. The premium is pricey—$50,000—but worth it, he said.

These are high sums indeed, but fertility consultants in America tell me that’s fairly common with their Chinese clientele.
“I’ve never gone back and forth in negotiations with them, which is not typical of US and other countries,” said Wendie Wilson-Miller, coauthor of
The Insider’s Guide to Egg Donation
, who also runs an egg donor agency.

The two families regularly communicate by Skype or e-mail once a week. “I play a pretty big part in their family, like a sister who lives farther away,” said Krywokulsky.

In late 2012, Jiang quit his job to set up DiYi. “In my previous job, out of fifty-two weeks I’d spend thirty-two traveling. With three kids, I needed a better work balance.” He puts his clientele into four categories: people suffering from infertility; single men or women who need third-party help to have children; gay people (“It’s not that rare;
I believe in this country there are 50 to 60 million highly discriminated against gay people”); and, until recently, people trying to evade the one-child policy.

The last category included people whose jobs were at risk if they have more than one child, such as government officials or executives at state-owned companies. “People who fall into this category are rare, less than 10 percent. Most people I see are infertile; that’s about 75 percent of the business.”

Recently, Jiang consulted with some clients and learned the intended father was a high-ranking government official who was very afraid of exposure, he said. They ultimately backed out. “Basically people are coming to me for family building. They’re eager for the child, that’s the ultimate essence. They are
so
eager for a child.”

IV

Jiang’s clients are part of a bigger group who come to America to have babies. It’s a surprising reversal of the tide that began with Americans going to China for babies a decade ago. While there are no reliable figures on how big this phenomenon is, there is ample evidence that the numbers have risen sharply in recent years. The Washington, DC–based Center for Immigration Studies estimates that there are forty thousand so-called birth tourists annually but does not break down the figure by nationality. Several news reports say at least ten thousand Chinese “anchor babies” were born in America in 2012, citing an estimate by the Maternal Management Organization, a little-known online platform dedicated to monitoring and rating confinement centers for Chinese women giving birth in the States.

Confinement centers are establishments that cater to the Chinese tradition of a one-month postnatal “confinement period,” called
zuoyuezi
“sitting the month,” which some consider essential to the
future health and well-being of child and mother. These kinds of places have mushroomed in Southern California in recent years, to cater to Chinese nationals giving birth in America. They typically charge $30,000 and upward for an all-inclusive six-week stay. They have also made an easy, centralized target for the anti-immigration movement, amid growing calls from extremists for a repeal of the Fourteenth Amendment, which grants citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States.
Since 2010 the number of raids on confinement centers has increased, and a major 2013 operation involving federal agents is “likely to culminate in the biggest federal criminal case ever against the booming ‘anchor baby’ industry,” said the
Wall Street Journal.

As a result, the
zuoyuezi
business will likely go underground or be stamped out. Next on the list may be fertility services that cater to the China market, where, at the high end, consumers spend between $120,000 and $150,000. Some using fertility services may not have infertility issues but use reproductive technologies to have the kind of children they want. This usually means choosing the sex and the number—twins are favored—and screening out genetic diseases. In cases where an egg donor is desired—and where genetic material is passed on—Chinese parents are also trying to select traits like intelligence, height, looks, blood type, even double eyelids.

“Everybody comes in wanting bright, but every culture will choose pretty over bright no matter what they say,” said Wilson-Miller. “But the Chinese almost always want taller, at least five foot five.
And they have questions about eyelids; they want to see baby pictures to see if the donor’s had eyelid surgery.”

Since there aren’t many egg donors of East Asian descent, they usually command a premium, but the incursion of Chinese parents over the past years has driven demand through the roof, say providers. Typically, egg donors get about $6,000 in compensation, but East
Asian donors can get twice or even triple that amount. “Every single Chinese donor I get, I could match her for ten cycles,” said Wilson-Miller. (To avoid health risks, donors should not donate more than six cycles, say experts.)

Almost all of Wilson-Miller’s East Asian egg donors are college students in the United States on student visas. There still aren’t enough to meet demand, which is increasingly leading to a bizarre circularity: egg donors from Taiwan and China are flown to America to help make babies that will be brought back to China.

When I spoke to Jiang, he was on the verge of arranging for just such a transaction with a Taiwanese donor. Taiwanese donors are favored because they have visa-free entrée into the United States, although recently loosened US visa requirements for Chinese nationals are changing this scenario. “We have to figure out ways to meet demand,” said Wilson-Miller. “We’re not getting enough Chinese donors.”

Chinese nationals are not the only folks availing themselves of these so-called designer baby techniques. But of all nationalities they are probably the most enthusiastic, and their numbers and economic clout will significantly shape this developing market.

Due to the one-child policy, Chinese nationals have already been conditioned to think of reproduction as a tool for bettering society and spurring social mobility. The habit of making hard choices in childbearing has become ingrained, and they are already accustomed to controlling for the number and gender of their offspring, while some are even selecting for intelligence, height, and looks via egg donors. From there to “designer babies” is not such a great leap. In a 2012 survey conducted in Changsha City, southwest China, almost four hundred respondents were asked what kind of genetic screening they would prefer.
Over 50 percent of respondents said they would be interested in health-related genetic screening; 23 percent chose “eugenics,” meaning screening for brighter kids.

What happens if genetic screening for intelligence really becomes available? Research in this area is already happening. In 2013, researchers at BGI Shenzhen, the largest gene-sequencing facility in the world, began a project to explore the genetic basis for human intelligence. It’s far from clear if such a thing is possible. Many scientists argue that intelligence is too complex to be isolated to a pure genetic component. BGI Shenzhen certainly has put huge resources and brought together bright minds on this project, including behavioral geneticist Robert Plomin and University of Michigan physicist Steve Hsu. Perhaps the most intriguing member of the group is project head Zhao Bowen, a prodigy who dropped out of high school and coauthored a research paper on the genetic sequencing of cucumbers at the tender age of fifteen. Zhao believes, “People ought to be free to manipulate their children’s IQ.
It’s their own choice.”

The BGI team predicts it will be possible in their lifetimes for people using IVF to select embryos that have better genetic markers for intelligence, thus enabling parents to boost their offspring’s IQs prenatally by up to twenty points.

Although this scenario is still in the realm of speculation, it makes me uneasy. The one-child policy already widened inequalities in China. If you’re rich, you’re likely to have had more children, with less impunity. What if those children can be smarter, less disease prone, and taller? Then China will draw even closer to the dystopian society envisioned by Aldous Huxley in
Brave New World
, where the population is created in the lab and classified. Alphas are rulers, and worker bees like the Epsilons are cognitively stunted and programmed never to aspire above their station.

In 1995, China passed the National Maternal and Infant Health Law, forbidding couples who had “genetic diseases of a serious nature” to procreate. The conditions listed include mental retardation, mental illness, and seizures. These couples were required to undergo
a mandatory premarital medical exam. It was hugely controversial, reviving international criticism that China practices eugenics.

Actually, the wording of the national law was considered mild. Some provinces had more explicit regulations.
In 1988, Gansu Province passed local regulations prohibiting “reproduction of the dull-witted, idiots, or blockheads.” Gansu abolished that law in 2002. Similarly, the National Maternal and Infant Health Law was defanged when requirements for the premarital medical examination were quietly dropped in 2003.

V

What happens when the world’s most populous nation has a baby shortage?

For the past twenty years, China has seen below-replacement birthrates. In the meantime, the problems of a huge elderly population, a labor shortage, and a shortage of women would best be ameliorated by an uptick in births, which isn’t happening and may never happen.

After over three decades of the one-child policy, the Communist Party has finally taken steps to end it, only to find to its dismay that many middle-class Chinese don’t want more than one child.

As we saw, in 2013, China allowed more couples to have second children through the
dandu
exclusion—where at least one half of the couple is a single child—but the take-up has been far below even the most pessimistic projections.
Only a tenth of eligible couples applied for permission to have a second child. Even though polls show many couples would like to have two children, many say in practice it’s unaffordable, too stressful, and will impinge on their personal goals too much. Many also view fertility as a strategy for social mobility: by having one child, they can better concentrate their resources and have a more successful child.
“It’s actually seen as selfish and bad parenting
to have another child,” demographer Ma Xiaohong told the
Washington Post.

In that sense, the one-child policy can be judged a huge success, for it changed the mindset of Chinese people. A young friend said, “For years, the government has been educating its people that birth planning is the best family style. It means wealth, happiness, and a less crowded society. I think such propaganda is very successful. And this one-child policy does improve a lot of families’ life standards. For me, brought up in a one-child family, it seems natural to bear only one child.”

Perhaps proof of the one-child policy’s effectiveness is obsolescence: in demographer Ma’s survey on why Chinese parents have just one child, 60 percent said the one-child policy had nothing to do with their decision.

Harvard University professor Susan Greenhalgh has argued that China’s rapid fertility decline has less to do with the physical coercive tactics employed by officials, and more to do with Chinese society’s view that controlling fertility could lead to upward mobility.
In terms of reproduction, “the Chinese represent a case of extreme economic rationalism,” wrote Greenhalgh.

In Huxley’s
Brave New World
, the dictator Mustapha Mond argues that the world is better run when children are hatched in labs. “The world’s stable now. People are happy, they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get. They’re well off; they’re safe; they’re never ill; they’re not afraid of death; they’re blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they’re plagued with no mothers or fathers.”

In a paean to human irrationality, the hero, the Savage, defiantly replies, “But I don’t want comfort. I want God. I want poetry. I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.”

In time, China’s problem will become that of every other major East Asian economy: a dwindling population. It’s a problem almost
all developed countries are facing. Countries that switched from anti-natalist to pro-natalist policies have so far found that turning
on
the baby tap is far more difficult than turning it off.