China’s once-unwanted daughters have grown up—and now they shun motherhood

livemint.com:

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Soon after Simona Dai was born in 1992 in rural China, she was sent to live with a foster family, hidden away so her parents could hold out for a son. Driving that decision was the country’s one-child policy, in place from 1980 through 2015.

Dai was the second daughter of her parents, under an exemption that let rural families have a second child if the first was a girl. She wasn’t really a part of her birth family again until after her brother was born four years later. Her fate as an unacknowledged daughter wasn’t uncommon among women born during that era, where the edict to limit births often collided with family pressure to have a son.

Across China’s villages and small towns, many women hid from state enforcers to avoid forced abortions in out-of-quota pregnancies or fought with relatives over whether to hide or abandon “illegal" baby girls. Now 32, Dai has decided against having children herself. “I never felt the kind of unconditional love from my mom," she said.

“I don’t know how I could give it to another human." Having scrapped the one-child policy, the Communist Party is now championing the term “family values" and pressuring women to have more children as it grows increasingly anxious over China’s shrinking population. Those pressures are colliding with the lingering—and never addressed—emotional toll of decades of draconian enforcement of birth restrictions. Dai and countless other women not only witnessed their parents’ pain over children abandoned or never born but were themselves made to feel that they were mere obstacles in the family’s quest for a son.