China Changes Its “One-Child Policy.” Here’s What I Think About It.

Yeah, yeah, yeah – I can hear the comment section already. “Miss CJ – why are you worried about what China’s doing?” Really, I’m not. But I found this news article today and it sounded interesting and culturally relevant and I wanted to talk about it.

If you don’t know, China has had a long and super-strict policy of only allowed couples to have one child because their population was so big. China also has a cultural stigma that is severely prejudiced and hateful against women. Plus, there’s the cultural idea that a son would be better able to take care of his parents as they got older. So if a couple has a baby girl, they would rather abort the baby or kill her (but I repeat myself) or abandon the child and try again for a boy. This has led to an overwhelmingly male population – almost 50 million more men than women. That is, for every 100 females born, there are 120 males.

This graph from the above sourcelink shows just how insane the disparity between the genders is in China –

Welcome to Communist China, everybody!

And there are even more problems from this –

The one-child policy has created a huge industry for abortions in the country. More than 13 million abortions are recorded each year, which doesn’t account for the black market. Nine out of 10 women who had premarital sex reported that they’ve had at least one abortion, according to the Institute of Population Research at Peking University. The government has had limited success in preventing sex testing during pregnancies in order to boost the number of females born.

Human rights organizations have exposed government practices of forced abortions and sterilization of men after they’ve had one child. Forced procedures are technically illegal and legislation states that fines should be imposed for parents going above their cap, but they happen nonetheless.

Millions of female births have gone unreported as parents kill new-born children or abandon them on the side of the road. The skewed ratio has also left frustrated men to die single, which was has also caused a spike in sexual assaults.

Geez. You wanna talk about a rape culture?

But now, according to this, the one-child policy is being abolished, which is a HUGE deal. Especially for a country that leads the world in abortions and has tons of reported instances of human trafficking and rape (and that’s just what gets reported). Now, it’s not like the Chinese government is suddenly saying “Have as many kids as you want!” They’re still putting the limit at two kids (oh thank you, glorious and merciful dictators!) And that’s only because the overwhelming number of single men has created such a problem for the country. They probably wouldn’t have bothered – except that it’s become such an issue.

It’ll be interesting to see if increasing of children Chinese couples can have to two is going to make any kind of difference in the long run. Hopefully it’ll mean that fewer baby girls will be left to die and that fewer people will have to undergo forced abortions and sterilizations courtesy of the government (and here I thank the good Lord that I don’t live in a country where the government barges into my life and takes away those personal decisions. Someone wanna clue feminists screaming for free birth control and government-funded abortion in on this?) Then again – there’s still that government-imposed limit.

That can’t be a good thing in the long run.