Health authorities in parts of China have begun asking women of childbearing age to report the date of their last menstrual period, triggering criticism online and renewed scrutiny of how far the state can reach into private life.
In a village in Xuanwei, Yunnan Province, a message was circulated in a local WeChat group instructing “all moms” to submit their “last menstrual period” in a specific format—“name + last menstrual period date + phone number”—and to add their current location if they were living outside the area. The message said the information was required from everyone.
The local health bureau said the reporting was part of “pregnancy screening” meant to identify pregnant women early so officials could provide basic public health services. However, residents and rights advocates say the method crosses a line and reflects growing official pressure to raise birthrates after decades of strict family-planning enforcement.
The Yunnan case spread online beyond the province quickly after screenshots circulated. Many on Chinese social media called the practice intrusive and humiliating.
One wrote, “I’ve lived long enough to see this,” and joked that “the menstrual police are here.”
Others questioned priorities, saying authorities seem eager to collect menstrual data while withholding information about other social problems. One commenter sarcastically asked whether officials would someday start notifying women of their fertile days and expect follow-up reports.
Unmarried Women and Students Also Asked
The practice has not been confined to one province, nor to married women, according to accounts given to The Epoch Times by women in several regions.A resident of Luquan County in Yunnan told The Epoch Times she was contacted even though she was not married.
“I’m not married, but last year, the village women’s federation called me to ask about my period dates, and asked when I planned to get pregnant,” she said.
She said she did not know how the caller obtained her phone number and was told that pregnancy could qualify her for certain benefits.
“They wanted the date of the last day of my period, but I ignored it. It’s too outrageous,” she added.
Residents in Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Henan provinces, including unmarried female college students, also said they had been asked to report menstrual dates.
A college student in Jiangsu told The Epoch Times that staff members called her directly and asked multiple times. She said it did not appear to be a school-run tally.
“Whoever was asking, I told them it’s my privacy and didn’t answer,” she said.
A student in Zhejiang Province likewise told The Epoch Times that her school required students each month to report the previous month’s menstrual date.
Population Control Never Truly Ended
Prominent Chinese human rights activist Chen Guangcheng told The Epoch Times that the new reporting demands have to be understood against the backdrop of China’s shrinking population—and the regime’s long legacy of coercive population control.
China has recorded fewer than 10 million births for three consecutive years, he said, and the country has experienced a significant reduction in its population over the past five to six years that is not fully reflected in official data.
“The population crisis caused by the Chinese regime’s violent, killing-based family-planning policies is becoming increasingly apparent,” Chen said.
With marriage rates continuing to fall, he said, births are “unlikely to rebound.” He said that even maintaining “basic social and ecological balance” is becoming difficult.
Chen said it is a “step forward” that more people now recognize such reporting requirements as violations of privacy—but stressed that intrusive surveillance has never truly stopped under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Similar practices, he said, were routine during the height of family-planning enforcement.
He recalled a system in which women of childbearing age were required to undergo regular pregnancy checks—sometimes every three months—known as “station inspections.”
Women working away from home were still required to return for examinations to prove they were not pregnant. If they were, Chen said, they risked being subjected to forced abortions.
Family-planning offices and maternal-and-child health centers were often used to carry out the checks, sometimes through designated clinics and staff. In some cases, Chen said, authorities dispatched squads to seize pregnant women and forcibly terminate pregnancies.
“Sometimes they sent out squads—10 or 20 people,” he said, who would restrain women and inject chemicals directly into the womb, “killing the child.”
Chen said international awareness of such abuses lagged for years.
As a legal activist based in Linyi, Shandong, Chen, who is blind, documented alleged forced abortions, sterilizations, and violent family-planning enforcement in the early 2000s, collecting testimonies, assisting villagers with lawsuits, and sharing evidence with journalists and foreign observers. For his activism, he was later detained, tried, and imprisoned.
“Family-planning policy was a red line for the CCP,” Chen said.
Before that reporting, he said, many outside China underestimated the extent of coercive enforcement. At the time, Washington was still debating funding for U.N.-affiliated women’s and population programs connected to China—funding that Beijing claimed supported maternal health and “better births.”
From Limiting Births to Pressuring Births
Chen said the shift from restricting births to pushing births creates a new kind of pressure—one that could be folded into official performance targets.Authorities, he said, could assign “responsibility” to local cadres, effectively directing specific officials to monitor specific women or households.
He compared it to the old “one-vote veto” system, in which failing to meet family-planning targets could erase other achievements and block promotions.
In a reversed system, Chen said, officials could be penalized if birth targets are not met—creating incentives to push harder.
He warned that officials may focus on hitting quotas—making sure babies are born—while offering little support to families after delivery.
“Back then, they forced people to pay ‘social maintenance fees’ for out-of-plan births,” Chen said. “Does the state now have the moral authority to demand people produce more children for society?”
A resident of Luohe in Henan Province told The Epoch Times she found the menstrual-date surveys deeply offensive.
“I hope we’re overthinking it—maybe it’s just to count pregnant women,” she said.
She added that while the state once had tools to stop births, pushing people to have children is likely to be far more difficult.
Chen said the state can realistically lean only on incentives—such as subsidies and support to reduce household burdens—rather than outright coercion.
“Forcing people to abort or have more children—only criminal gangs would do that,” he said, saying also that the CCP is not a “normal government” but a party-state regime.
The new pressure is visible not just in data collection and grassroots “persuasion,” but also in messaging from the public-health establishment.
Online commenters reacted with skepticism, questioning how such findings square with years of strict birth limits and accusing authorities of using “science” to sell higher fertility.
Fewer Babies, Empty Classrooms
Chinese officials have said decades of family-planning policies resulted in more than 400 million fewer births in mainland China. As births continue to fall, the effects are now visible in schools.Data from the 2023 and 2024 National Education Development Statistical Bulletins showed that about 20,000 kindergartens shut down nationwide in 2024, and 15,000 private schools disappeared the same year.
Beijing has already reversed course on formal birth limits.
China’s one-child policy—introduced nationwide in the late 1970s and early 1980s and enforced until 2015—restricted most urban couples to a single child. Between 1980 and 2014, more than 300 million women had intrauterine devices (IUDs) inserted under state family-planning programs, and more than 100 million were sterilized.
In 2015, Beijing formally ended the one-child rule and allowed all couples to have two children starting in 2016. When that change failed to produce a sustained baby boom, authorities shifted again in 2021, adopting a three-child policy and scrapping most penalties for “out-of-quota” births.
A Shandong resident surnamed Du told The Epoch Times that local schools are still struggling to fill seats despite the loosening of birth limits.
“Whether they control it or not, no one wants to have kids,” he said.
He recalled seeing a private kindergarten advertisement: “99 yuan (about $14) for two weeks of trial enrollment.” The offer, he said, was posted in an older city-center district backed by a large residential community—underscoring how sharply newborn numbers have fallen.
