In its 2020 census data, Taiwan’s working-age population was shown to have fallen for the first time, with its 16.55 million people aged 15 to 64 being 169,000 fewer than in its 2010 census. The logical extension of a fertility rate that’s been falling steadily since 1967, medium-variant projections now suggest the total number of dependents will be greater than the working-age population in Taiwan by 2060.
Expanded child care subsidies, expanded fertility treatment subsidies and expanded affordable education subsidies have all failed to reverse this trend since it was declared a national security issue in 2006, and the implications are now wide ranging and stark.
“It naturally has implications for the labor markets, particularly for labor supply. It also changes sectional labor demand, even the necessity of provision of labor force in new areas such as elder care,” summarized Marcin Jerzewski, head of the Taiwan Office at the European Values Center for Security Policy, at a recent forum in Taipei. He added that an aging population was even more vulnerable to online disinformation.
The current debate over amendments to Taiwan’s 2007 Assisted Reproductive Act has played out within this context, but it has taken on an interesting, slightly unpredictable shape.
All of the major parties represented in the Legislative Yuan have expressed support for widening provision of assisted reproduction, which is currently only available to straight married couples where one spouse is infertile or has a hereditary disease and the other is able to receive the treatment.
And in some ways the logic appears clear enough. Around 17% of 135,571 births in 2023 resulted from assisted reproduction. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Chen Ching-hui (陳菁徽), an infertility specialist, told CNN last month that birth rates could rise by 20% to 30% under more relaxed rules.
But this is where things get complicated. Because prior to this year’s election, between the KMT, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), eight different proposals were put before the Legislative Yuan, and none were passed.
Splits are partly based on a number of fertility treatments being bundled together. Regulatory and financial packages for egg freezing, fertility treatment and surrogacy are all being discussed at the same time. And each comes loaded with ideological and practical implications.
Some legislators are arguing for open access to all, whether that means gay or lesbian couples or single mothers. Others want more limits. Some argue for changes to be made on the basis of human rights. Others argue through the lens of increasing birth rates. There are then procedural arguments about separating off different issues to pass the least controversial ideas first.
Within the debate, the KMT’s Chen Ching-hui has been a particularly high-profile participant. She has spoken out in favor of widening access to assisted reproductive procedures for unmarried couples, single women and lesbian couples, and hosting public hearings on more controversial issues such as surrogacy.
Speaking to Domino Theory via written message, Chen explained that although discussions should “include surrogacy and same-sex marriage,” as a first step to reform, “we mainly want to focus on young women who hope to ‘decouple marriage and childbearing,’ lesbian couples, as well as groups who wish to have children but are unable to conceive.”
Across these categories, the emphasis on women is for technical reasons, because they start the process of assisted reproduction with more of the biological tools required. “Reproduction requires sperm, eggs, and a uterus. From this, we can see that biological females possess two of those components and do not necessarily need to go through surrogacy,” she said.
Chen frames the issue as both relating to human rights and as a realistic response to low birth rates. In making the case for helping people who want children outside of marriage, she pointed out that marriage has already been substantially decoupled from having children, with “Only 25% of marriages [being] for the purpose of having children,” while she presented “the ultra-low birth rates of unmarried, single, or partnerless women” as an opportunity.
Currently, childbirth outside of marriage makes up less than 4% (PDF) of total births in Taiwan, despite the percentage of women between 15 and 49 who are unmarried now reaching over 50%.
What is interesting here is that many of these points made by Chen intersect with those made by legislators across party divides. DPP legislator Hung Sun-han (洪申翰), for instance, has spoken up in favor of allowing single women and female same-sex couples to receive assisted reproduction in the same realist context of noting the large numbers of women who are not married or divorced.
On the other hand, within the same parties, there have been clear areas of disagreement. The TPP’s December 2023 Party Caucus Proposal made the broad case for access for fertility treatment to all, while TPP legislator Chen Gau-tzu (陳昭姿) has only argued in favor of an extension for heterosexual married couples where the wife does not have a functional uterus.
This mixture makes a lot of sense in the context of Taiwan’s parties being organized primarily around cross-strait issues, rather than a conservative-liberal or left-right divide. How a politician views relations with China certainly need not impact whether they believe surrogacy is inherently exploitative or not.
It also chimes with the idea that the unusual shape of Taiwanese politics can create unusual alliances. This week we spoke to DPP Nantou County Councilor Shen Shu-chen (沈夙崢), who said that in some ways young DPPers and KMTers were more similar to each other than they were to the older politicians in their own parties.
From a distance, this arrangement might present opportunities for creative political solutions — more partisan debates are often framed as the most intractable — but it also obviously leaves a huge amount of political organization and agreement left to fight for.
And this doesn’t end with fertility treatment. For Chen, economic issues are a significant cause of young people’s reticence around having children, and any regulatory shifts around assisted reproduction should also come among a range of other policy choices that help make bringing up children easier while adapting to the demands of modern society.
Chen pointed out, for instance, that only 25% of men in Taiwan choose to take paternity leave and called on relevant agencies in Taiwan to refer to an initiative in Japan that sets clear implementation targets for men’s paternity leave at the corporate level. She also endorsed the system in Denmark, where each parent has 90 days of non-transferable leave. “This means that if either parent does not use their designated leave, the other parent cannot use it, thus using this system to encourage men to take parental leave,” she explained.
There is, in other words, a large amount of work to get through — including in legislating for people not to go to work.
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