A Chinese Woman Sued to Freeze Her Eggs. She Lost.

Faced with a shrinking population, China’s top leadership has tried everything to get women to have more babies. Everything, it turns out, except allowing unmarried women to freeze their eggs.

A Beijing court this week chose to uphold a longstanding rule that only married women may use the procedure. Rights activists say the rule is unfair because it excludes single women from a reproductive measure that gives them the option to put off childbirth.

The ruling centers on a lawsuit filed by Teresa Xu, against an obstetrics hospital after a doctor denied her access to egg freezing services and instead told her that she should get married and have children quickly.

On Wednesday, Ms. Xu said the Chaoyang Intermediate People’s Court in Beijing had rejected her lawsuit, exhausting her legal options in a six-year battle for reproductive rights. The court had argued that her rights were not violated.

In a livestream video, Ms Xu, 36, a freelance writer in Guangzhou, said she wasn’t surprised by the court’s decision. “I was mentally prepared for it,” she said in the video that was later posted to her social media account. “This result wasn’t all that unexpected.”

In China, the ruling Communist Party continues to have a large say over who may have children, and how many. For years, it allowed families to have only one child. As births slowed significantly, threatening growth, officials loosened the one-child policy to allow for two children and then three.