China’s first case of male embryo infringement has been heard at a Nanjing court this month. 26 February, the Nanjing Intermediate People’s Court announced a ruling by the Xuanwu Court in favour of a woman in a case regarding the custody of her embryos.
Presiding over the case was Judge Chen Wenjun, who announced that a unilateral decision by the husband, to terminate and abandon his wife’s embryos, violated her physical reproductive rights.
According to law, after a wife becomes pregnant, the husband has no right to compel his wife to abort the pregnancy, otherwise, it constitutes an infringement of the wife’s personal rights, as revealed by Chinese news sources Sina News and The Paper.
Judge Chen said that it is common for a woman to terminate embryos without consent, but uncommon for a man to do so. In this case, the man lived abroad and handled payment for embryo storage, where they had been in the custody of a state hospital in the United States.
The couple registered their marriage in 2010, after which time both agreed to assisted artificial insemination surgery in the United States. The hospital extracted 13 eggs, from which six healthy embryos survived, of which one was used. As a result of physical problems, the wife had an abortion, resulting in five left-over eggs, which the couple both agreed to keep under hospital custody.
In 2016, the husband applied for divorce, which the courts ruled against. In 2017, he tried again, at which point it was revealed that he had terminated payment for the remaining five embryos a year earlier without her consent. Upon discovering the news, his wife then sought ¥50,000 in compensation.
In the end, the man was ordered to pay ¥30,000 in damages for bearing pain and injury (physical and mental repercussions, as a result of his actions), the age factor (the woman was 36 years old) and the degree of nostalgia for marriage (it was revealed that, during the first divorce hearing, the woman showed strong opposition to the divorce; court ruled that this showed more concern for the embryos).
Family planning law in China has remained controversial since its conception. In 2002, a 35-year-old man was the first in China to sue his wife for infringing on his right to have a child by having an abortion.
An initial report by the BBC stated that, at that time, “The National People’s Congress, [had recently] approved the family planning law, ruling that a woman had no priority over her spouse in deciding whether to have a child”.
