The birth and routinization of IVF in China

How can it be that China, with its history of restrictive family planning policies, is today home to some of the world’s largest IVF clinics, carrying out as many as 30,000 cycles annually? This article addresses how IVF was developed in China during the early 1980s, becoming routinized at the same time as one of the world’s most comprehensive family planning programmes aimed at preventing birth was being rolled out. IVF was not merely imported into China; rather it was experimentally developed within China into a form suitable for its restrictive family planning regulations. As a result, IVF and other procedures of assisted reproductive technology have settled alongside contraception, sterilization and abortion as yet another technology of birth control.