Fertility vs. Equality: How Taiwan’s Battle Against Low Fertility Rates Creates a Feminist Dilemma

The first talk in the Island at the Crossroads: New Directions in Taiwan Studies series.

Republican Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance’s resurfaced remarks on “childless cat ladies” and the “civilization crisis” have sparked criticism of singlism and reignited debates on pronatalism. Meanwhile, across the Pacific, Taiwan – a country whose first female president and incumbent vice president are both never-married women without children who love cats – has been addressing low fertility as a national security crisis by adopting pro-marriage and pro-family policies to promote childbirth. However, the fact that “childless cat ladies” are among Taiwan’s top political leaders is less a testament to Taiwan being a gender-equal country free of discrimination against single and childfree women and more of a paradox. Taiwan’s national consensus on pronatalist population policies has created political opportunities for feminists to push for family-friendly policies. However, these opportunities come at the cost of undermining reproductive justice by framing women primarily as bearers of the nation, thus presenting a feminist dilemma. This raises critical questions about how Taiwan’s feminist movement should engage with population politics in its pursuit of legal and social change.

This lecture draws on the insights of feminist legal history and explores the historical intertwining of feminist legal mobilization and population control policies. It illuminates both the gains and losses of feminists operating within such frameworks under martial law. Furthermore, it critically examines the risks and benefits of employing pronatalist frameworks to advance gender equality after Taiwan’s democratization. The lecture will demonstrate how population control policies contributed to the legalization of abortion and granted women some limited rights to name their children under authoritarian rule. Additionally, it will explore how pro-marriage, pronatalist policies have served as strange bedfellows for feminists in recent decades. In conclusion, it will be proposed that the feminist movement should disentangle itself from these paradoxical alliances to pursue gender equality on its own terms.

Chao-ju Chen is a distinguished professor and director of the Center for Human Rights and Jurisprudence at National Taiwan University College of Law. She was Hauser Global Professor at New York University School of Law in 2022. She received her S.J.D. and LL. M. degrees from the University of Michigan Law School and LL.B. and LL.M. degrees from National Taiwan University. Her research centers at the intersection of equality, feminism, legal history, and legal mobilization. A prolific writer on motherhood, marriage, family, sexual abuse, citizenship, indigenous identity, constitutional equality, feminist legal theory, and multiculturalism, she has published numerous articles in scholarly journals and books, as well as in popular media.

This project is supported by a David A. Gardner ’69 Magic Grant from the Humanities Council, as well as the Department of East Asian Studies and the Program in East Asian Studies.