Chinese Couples Break the Silence Over Infertility

In a country known the world over for its strict one-child policy, Cui Hui and his wife would give anything to have that only child.

He runs a successful Internet company and she teaches at a university. Married for eight years, they were busy pursuing their careers and kept thinking there would be time down the road to start a family. Now, both 33, they are having trouble conceiving.

“We feel a lot of pressure from our peers and our parents,” Cui said. “They are always asking, ‘When are you going to have a child?’ ” Unable to deflect the questions and too embarrassed to tell the truth, the Cuis decided to seek professional help.

Just a decade ago, reproductive intervention -- other than herbal remedies and prayer -- was a foreign concept to average Chinese.

Today, doctors in the world’s most populous nation are helping people make more babies.

“Our country’s focus in the past has been on birth control, how to bring down the population,” said Dr. Zuo Wenli, a reproductive specialist at Peking University’s No. 1 Hospital. “We did not encourage fertility treatments. Now we have a more humane approach. If people can’t have children, you must allow them to get help.”

The first few fertility clinics popped up about eight years ago, and demand is so high that at least 170 around the country now offer reproductive services, some industry experts say. Others contend that the number is much higher, as unlicensed facilities lured by the perceived easy profit of the baby business compete with legitimate hospitals for the trust of childless couples.

Some healthy couples are also getting fertility treatments in hope of increasing the likelihood of having twins or triplets.

“It’s a subtle way of ducking the one-child policy without actually breaking the rules,” Cui said. “If it’s possible, I too would like to have more than one child.”

The government has just begun to crack down on an industry that until a few years ago was left largely unregulated. This month, a senior health official reinforced the country’s ban on surrogate mothering, as well as the unauthorized exchange of eggs and sperm, saying offenders would be harshly punished.

Clinics are required to get a government license to provide fertility treatments, but many do it illegally. The government has promised more inspections to close illegal operators, which may have inadequately trained doctors and make false promises of multiple births.

The private clinics spend heavily on advertising on nearly two dozen satellite TV stations and in local newspapers around the country, hiring movie stars and pop singers and promising to work miracles.

The cultural stigma of acknowledging fertility problems has lessened, and many of those who once might have suffered in silence are seeking help, said Dr. Zhuang Guanglun, one of the veterans of fertility treatment in China. He works at Zhongshan Medical University’s Number One Hospital in Guangzhou, which treats about 1,300 couples a year.

“Before, you did not want to admit you couldn’t have a baby on your own,” Zhuang said. “Even if you did want to admit it, China was too backward. People were worrying about putting food on the table. How could they imagine a test-tube baby?”

Now that economic reforms have made a large number of Chinese people rich and well-informed, fertility clinics have become a new beacon of hope, even as the government targets some of the enterprises.

Two years ago, Lu Jinfeng founded China’s first surrogate mother website. It promises to introduce sterile couples to women willing to carry fetuses to term. The most desired candidates for surrogate motherhood have a college degree, are at least 5 feet 3 and have no health problems, not even near-sightedness.

The price tag is $5,000 to $12,000, depending on the surrogate’s educational and physical qualifications. To get around the law against such arrangements, insemination must take place outside China. That expense, and all medical costs as well as care for the surrogate mother during the pregnancy, must be paid for by the client.

Lu claims to have successfully helped 200 couples produce offspring.

“Demand is definitely greater than the number of volunteers we can find,” said Lu, whose website was shut down last year by police, forcing him to relocate. He operates in constant fear of being sanctioned again.

The downside to high customer demand is a rising incidence of fraud. Lu said some websites offer big money to recruit potential surrogate mothers but are in fact fronts for kidnapping rings or other illegal reproductive services.

Well-advertised private facilities based in big cities may be no more trustworthy. In a high-profile scandal this year, a Shanghai fertility hospital prescribed thousands of dollars worth of drugs to two women who, it turned out, were pregnant at the time they began treatment.

“At first, I didn’t believe him either,” said a client of Lu who was willing to give only his last name, Chi. The farmer turned entrepreneur doesn’t want anyone in his community to know he hired a surrogate, who gave birth four months ago to his son.

“My wife and I had been in a motorcycle accident,” Chi said. “She was pregnant at the time. We lost the baby and she was never able to get pregnant again.” The couple spent thousands of dollars seeking treatment, to no avail.

Then a relative told him about Lu’s website and they met a 27-year-old divorced mother with a high school education.

“They are like saviors to us,” Chi said. “When I look at my son now I just want to laugh. You cannot imagine the joy.”

Another reason the fertility business is so hot is that although foreigners have adopted thousands of Chinese babies, couples here do not see adoption as an option.

“It would be very hard for me to accept adoption,” said Cui, the Internet entrepreneur. “Even if I could, I wouldn’t know what to do.”

So the lines at the fertility clinics continue to grow.

“I just met a patient who got pregnant,” said Li Ying, a 28-year-old farmer from central China who was waiting for a doctor in Beijing’s Xinxing Hospital, a large private facility that says it treats 250,000 patients a year.

Li and her husband, married for five years, came to Beijing seeking fertility treatments because of ads they had seen on TV.

“There are a lot of people in my situation back home,” Li said, sitting in a lounge surrounded by pictures of mothers holding their newborns and videos explaining how the hospital can make would-be parents’ dreams come true. “They are waiting to hear good news from me. I just want to give it my all. I have to believe it is possible.”