When one of Taiwan’s top creative directors staged a street marriage proposal on Mother’s Day, Dentsu Taiwan’s Alice Chou wasn’t looking for love. Instead, she was hunting for signatures to overturn a law that forces women to choose between independence and motherhood.

The creative industry has always loved its myths. We say we can move culture, shift perceptions, change the world—sometimes all in thirty seconds. We present ourselves not just as advertisers, but often as activists by proxy. And in Taiwan, it’s been particularly tempting to believe that story. 

Here is a country celebrated as Asia’s progressive beacon: the first to legalise same-sex marriage, technologically booming, and rightfully lauded for its gender-equality rankings. It seemed to prove we were living in alignment with the values we so often project on stage.

And I believed it. I too, believed creativity could move mountains. What I didn’t account for was that mountains are not metaphors, and progress is rarely linear, and the real test of change often comes when culture collides with law, and when the slogans of equality meet the fine print of legislation.

That collision for me was waiting in Taiwan’s Assisted Reproduction Act. Enacted in 2007, it provides the legal framework for access to assisted reproductive technologies like IVF, including egg freezing and donation, but only under certain conditions—including spousal consent. On paper, the statute looks almost absurd in a modern democracy: women may freeze their eggs, but they can use them only if married to a man who provides written consent. 

Single women did not exist in the framework. Neither did same-sex couples, who though legally recognised in marriage since 2019, remained excluded from assisted reproductive technologies like IVF. According to the statute, there was only one narrow vision of family, preserved in law, while society and justice evolved around it.

The cruelty also lay in its invisibility. According to the Awakening Foundation, over 80% of women freezing their eggs were unaware of this barrier. They believed they were preserving a choice, only to discover later that the choice did not legally belong to them at all. Meanwhile demand was surging: National Taiwan University Hospital reported that among women aged 35 to 39, egg freezing rose by 86% in just three years. It’s as though hope was being stored in liquid nitrogen, but access was being withheld.

The campaign originated from a young colleague’s discovery of this overlooked issue. The team was stunned, not just by the law itself, but by how many women were completely oblivious to its existence. Despite Singapore’s progressive reputation, fertility remains a deeply personal topic that women rarely discuss openly. Most people had no knowledge of this legislation or the discrimination it perpetuated. We knew we needed to break this silence, so we invited a group of courageous women to start an honest, public conversation on social media.

We went back to first principles. What was the human truth? Women believed they were protecting their future; the law quietly removed it. What was the cultural tension? A society that celebrates motherhood, while restricting who may become a mother. What, then, was the brief? Make an invisible barrier visible in a single glance and move people from “I didn’t know” to “I must act.”

We debated the form. Film? A press conference? Out-of-home? In the end, the absurdity of the law needed to be seen, not explained. So, we chose live theatre in the everyday—the kind you stumble upon and can’t ignore. 

Together with The Awakening Foundation, and with every pun intended, in April 2024, Unfreeze My Rights was born.

Mother’s Day became our stage. A day when society heaps flowers and praise on mothers, while quietly denying many women the right to become one. In Taipei’s Xinyi District, we staged an outdoor activation: a middle-aged woman asking if a man could help by marrying her – with no month, no obligation and no other conditions. All she needed was a signature.  

For romance? No.

For companionship? Hardly.

For the single legal requirement that stood between her and her own frozen eggs. 

“Would you marry me?” she asked. “No strings attached—no house, no car, no feelings. Just a signature.”

People stopped. Some stared. Many laughed in confusion. We watched in equal parts anticipation and dread. Then they scanned the QR code and realised this was not theatre, this was a statute. A private injustice had been turned into public theatre.

What struck me most in that moment was how quickly discomfort gave way to recognition. The laughter faded. Some passers-by shook their heads. Others asked if it was really true. Strangers filmed, shared, argued among themselves. Within hours, an image of a woman publicly proposing marriage on the street  sparked debate across social feeds. What had been hidden in legal fine print was now embodied in flesh and bone—in the sight of a woman reduced to begging for a right that should have been hers by default.

That mattered. For years, NGOs and women’s groups had lobbied politely for reform, but the issue stayed buried in committee rooms. Numbers alone hadn’t cut through. A living scene on a busy street corner did. It translated a dry statute into a human absurdity. It made people feel the indignity in their bodies, not just read it in a policy brief.

Only then did we begin to see what creativity can do when it steps into silence.

The reaction was swift. Within three days, more than 13,000 people had signed the petition—tripling its target. Over 100 influencers and KOLs amplified the message, generating 50 million impressions. Coverage spread across 82 outlets and television programmes, reaching nearly 99% of mainstream media. What had been whispered in private became impossible to ignore.

Then, politics moved. 

Within a week, Taiwan’s Ministry of Health and Welfare issued a draft amendment to extend assisted reproduction rights to single women and same-sex couples. A debate that had been stalled for more than a decade was suddenly accelerated by cultural pressure.

That such a movement required a brand campaign to trigger it is telling. It illustrates how legislative inertia can persist until forced into daylight, and how profoundly cultural debate today is mediated through the commercial calculations of agencies and brands. Bureaucracy did not act when equality was argued in principle; they acted when contradiction was made visible in public space.

It also raises a broader question of timing. Campaigns are too often treated as if they were self-contained events: “launched in April 2024,” entered into award shows, and then retired to archives. Yet as of August 2025, the Assisted Reproduction Act remains unchanged, though the amendment is still under debate in parliament. 

Progress is not linear, and it does not conform to marketing calendars. Cultural movements resist timeboxes; they build in increments, accumulate pressure, and surface over years.

And yes, Unfreeze My Rights has since been recognised with awards, a Grand Prix, multiple golds and silvers, and shortlists at global shows. Such honours flatter any creative. But the more durable truth is that accolades only matter if they reinforce one creativity’s true purposes: not to decorate the world with slogans, but to expose contradictions until silence becomes untenable.

For this was never simply about fertility policy. Body autonomy is a cultural fault line. It determines whose futures are acknowledged, whose families are permitted, whose rights are negotiable. In Taiwan, the distance between progressive reputation and restrictive reality had widened into a chasm. Bridging that gap demanded more than bureaucratic drafting; it required imagination to dramatise the injustice and make inaction unsustainable.

This is your reminder that prejudice rarely announces itself loudly. It lingers instead in the quiet persistence of statutes, in bureaucratic delay, in habits unexamined. When law and life fall out of step, creativity must intervene—particularly when others choose to step back.

Alice Chou is the Chair of APAC Creative Council, Dentsu & Chief Creative officer, Dentsu Creative Taiwan.