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China’s wealthiest city explores why only 1 out of 8 mothers from Shanghai have a second child
- With one of China’s lowest fertility rates, Shanghai health authorities are trying to understand how reproductive decisions are being made, and home size matters
- Demographer warns that this year’s fertility rate ‘is expected to be even lower’, given the impact of the pandemic on births
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Only about one out of every eight mothers from Shanghai has had a second child, according to a new survey that illustrates how various factors are hindering the pregnancy rate in China’s wealthiest city.
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Even as China has been calling for years for couples to have more children, fewer than 13 per cent of mums with official urban residency in Shanghai, known as hukou, have had two kids, according to new fertility findings by Shanghai’s Health Commission, which set out to better understand how reproductive decisions are made and affected.
Among mothers who moved to Shanghai from elsewhere, nearly a third have had a second child.
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The survey results were taken from 19,314 women aged 20-49 across Shanghai’s 16 districts.
Shanghai and Beijing are among the most difficult places to obtain a hukou – a system that decides whether one has access to social welfare benefits, pensions or the public education system in the city of residence.
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