A migrant worker at a textile factory in Zhejiang has been ordered by family planning officials to travel the 1,600 kilometres back home in order to prove that she is not pregnant, the China Daily reported today.

Like millions of other mothers working away from home, Liu Yurong, had been mailing her pregnancy tests (required to show she was not pregnant again, in violation of family planning laws) back to officials in the city of Lianyuan in central Hunan. However, after a spate of allegedly forged pregnancy tests reported by family planning offices across the country, Lianyuan officials demanded that all examinations be done in person.

Now Liu is stuck between a rock and hard place. The journey home would cost several hundred yuan and she fears she will lose her job because the boss has so far refused to give her any time off. If she does not show up, family planning officials in Lianyuan have threatened to fine her husband’s family 2,000 yuan.

Of course, it would be illegal for Liu’s boss to fire her for returning home on the orders of government officials but managers across China illegally fire workers every day, and Liu should not be forced to run that risk.

China’s migrant workers have long faced systematic discrimination and exploitation because of the country’s antiquated household registration (hukou 户口) system, but this new stipulation is an absurd and retrograde step. If the authorities are serious about implementing family planning rules, they should provide free medical check ups and pregnancy tests to woman in the cities regardless of their hukou.

As CLB pointed out in our report on the children of migrant workers in China, urban governments have been reluctant to provide social services for migrant workers because of the cost they would incur, but the provision of free medical checks to migrant women would hardly be an onerous burden and would in addition help safeguard the health of one of the most disadvantaged groups in the urban China. The maternal death rate for migrant workers, for example, is often two or three times higher than for the urban population. And in one district in the Pearl River Delta, which had 850,000 permanent residents and nearly 1,000,000 migrant workers, almost 90 percent of maternal deaths between 1995 and 2005 were migrant workers.