How can it be that China today is home to some of the world’s largest IVF clinics, carrying out as many as 30,000 cycles annually? In this article, I address how IVF was developed in China during the early 1980s only to be routinized during the exact same period that 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 assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) have settled alongside contraception, sterilization and abortion as yet another technology of birth control.