Rita Jhangby JhuCin Rita Jhang
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English
Photo Credit: Espen Klem/Flickr/CC BY 2.0 DEED.
The following article is part of a special joint issue between New Bloom and Taiwan Insight on the 2024 elections.
THE 2024 TAIWANESE presidential election has garnered substantial international attention due to the ever-intricate US-Taiwan-China relationship. However, this election means more to the Taiwanese than just how they want to engage with China. Contrarily, domestic issues carried much more weight than usual, including housing prices, economic policies, transportation infrastructure, and, for the first time in the centre of the competition, the Assisted Reproductive Act (ARA).
Also noteworthy is the rise of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), led by former Taipei City Mayor Ko Wen-Je 柯文哲, which won 26.46% of the presidential votes and eight legislator seats via party-list (legislator-at-large) votes. The eight seats play a pivotal role as neither of the two major parties reached the 57-seat majority, with the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) winning 51 seats and the Kuomintang (KMT) 52 seats plus two unaffiliated but KMT-leaning seats. As DPP and KMT are unlikely to collaborate, they have to vie for the self-proclaimed neutral TPP votes to secure any legislative wins.
Within TPP’s legislative lineup is Chen Zhao-Zi 陳昭姿, a longtime surrogacy advocate driving the Party’s reproductive and fertility platforms. Meanwhile, KMT’s Ching-Hui Chen 陳菁徽, a renowned infertility specialist, also pushes for ARA amendment and surrogacy legalisation. The DPP, having just clinched an unprecedented third presidential term, declared the ARA amendment its top priority for 2024, recognising the urgency of addressing reproductive rights. Meanwhile, the 4th, 5th, and 6th largest parties (albeit actually rather small in votes received), the New Power Party (NPP), the Taiwan Obasang Political Equality Party (OBS), and Green Pary Taiwan (GPT), have all been vocal about their support of granting assisted reproductive technology (ART) access to single women and female same-sex couples, with some also supporting surrogacy legalisation.
Despite apparent agreement among major and significant small parties, the situation is intricate. One month before the 2024 election, the ARA amendment was deliberated, with eight versions of the amendment proposed by individual DPP, KMT, and TPP legislators or Party Caucuses. Yet, the Ministry of Health and Welfare (MoHW) did not advance its version. Eventually, none was passed. At the time, the Minister of MoHW, Jui-Yuan Hsueh 薛瑞元, did declare a one-year timeline, aiming to pass the amendment at the end of 2024, banking on DPP’s continued control of the presidential office and the legislative yuan.
The ARA, enacted in 2007, limited ART access to infertile heterosexual married couples in which the wife has a functional uterus. When the same-sex marriage act was passed in Taiwan in 2019, the ART eligibility criteria did not change accordingly. Current discussions on amendments include extending ART access to single women and female same-sex couples, with surrogacy being a more contentious topic. LGBTQ/tongzhi rights organisations call for a decoupling approach, fearing that tying ART access expansion and surrogacy together might hinder progress.
Divergent ideologies on ART access also exist. TPP’s Ko has contended that expanding ART access is an effective way to address the ultra-low fertility rate problem. Similarly, KMT’s presidential candidate Hou You-Yi 侯友宜 proposed heavily subsidising the third child (100 million NTD) and also subsidising single women’s egg freezing as ways to save the low fertility rate, despite not changing the requirement of being heterosexually married when a woman wants to thaw the eggs for fertilisation. Both have been criticised as instrumentalising women’s bodies and neglecting the structural barriers to childbearing. The MoHW also criticised Ho’s proposal to likely incentivise women to further delay marriage and childbearing.
When ART access is framed as a solution to this problem, advocates worry it is the state’s biopolitical control of women’s bodies for furthering national interest, reminiscing of the Handmaid’s Tale dystopian scheme. Not to mention the myriad reasons for women to steer away from childbearing, including unfriendly labour law, rigid work culture, the patriarchal burden in marriage, inadequate childcare infrastructure and resources, prohibitively expensive living costs, volatile cross-strait political tension, and even worries for climate change. What happens if the birth rate remains low even with ART access to all women?
In comparison, others, including DPP legislators such as Hung Sun-han 洪申翰 and Lin Chu-yin 林楚茵, and some small parties, such as GPT and OBS, urge expanding ART access not on the grounds of “saving fertility rate” but on the principle of equity and human rights. Sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) stipulates that every person is in control of whether, how, and when they have children. Therefore, excluding anyone from accessing ART is a human rights violation. And yet, for the general public, the discourse of human rights is often seen as foreign, unrealistic, and peremptory. In contrast, unorthodox childbearing (i.e., not within a heterosexual marriage) is seen as infringing upon their moral boundary. Therefore, this approach of arguing for expanding ART access may not amass enough support for the ruling Party to pass any amendment.
Regarding surrogacy, opinions diverge widely first on whether it is empowering or exploiting women. It is a perpetual feminist debate, one that resembles the debate about sex work: Are women forced to sell their bodies? Feminists opposing surrogacy worry that, no matter how well the regulations consider gender, race, and class, surrogacy is always exploitative and coercive financially, emotionally, and socially of the carrying mother. They also criticise surrogacy as a tool to feed the obsession with passing along the patrilineage bloodline, thus serving the patriarchal goal. On the other hand, proponents hold that, with proper informed consent and protections, women are free to choose to serve as surrogates, be it for altruist or financial purposes. Either way, it’s the women’s own choice, and thus it’s empowering. Furthermore, they argue that supporting alternative family formation is tearing down the patriarchal shackle that ties family formation to men’s penises, their sperms, and their ability to impregnate.
Another dilemma is eligibility. Some favour only heterosexual married couples where the wife does not have a functional uterus (such as TPP’s legislator-elect Chen Zhao Zi and DPP’s re-elected legislator Wu Bing Rui 吳秉叡). At the same time, some argue for access for all – regardless of gender, sex, marital status, or sexual orientation (such as TPP’s December 2023 Party Caucus Proposal, from which Chen Zhao Zi notably digressed after the election). No matter where the line is drawn, anger and dissatisfaction are unavoidable.
On top of the already-complicated issue, TPP is likely to leverage its influence as the pivotal few to dominate this discussion or take an extreme position to demonstrate how they differ from both DPP and KMT, a neutral position they advertise. ART access and surrogacy are going to be the first testing ground to determine the power dynamics among DPP, KMT, and TPP. This issue, like all other issues, is subject to over-politicisation, so checks and balances matter tremendously in the process.
Regardless of motive and means, more rights protected is always a good thing. There are increasingly more diverse families in Taiwan, and legal protection is crucial for all existing families and families to come. The newly formed legislature has its work cut out for them, and it is the Taiwanese people who need to hold the legislature accountable for the delivery of results.