‘You are married, why are you still not preparing for pregnancy?’, local official asks newly-wed woman
Chinese authorities are phoning up newlyweds and urging them to have children soon after getting married as part of a secretive government campaign to shore up the country’s declining birth rate.
Thousands of people, responding to a post on the Chinese social network Weibo on Thursday, reported getting calls from local health services asking if they were pregnant.
In one post, a Weibo user described a colleague’s experience answering a call from the Nanjing city government’s women’s health service.
The post’s author said their colleague was told by an official that the local government “wants newlyweds to be pregnant within a year and their target is to make a phone call every quarter”.