I’ve been hearing for years that this was possible, but I didn’t expect to see it: the Chinese government will now “allow” some of its citizens to bear up to two children.
Couples in which one parent is an only child will now be able to have a second child, one of the highlights of a sweeping raft of reforms announced three days after the ruling Communist Party ended a meeting that mapped out policy for the next decade.
Besides being an outrageous assault on human dignity, the government’s decades-long one child policy has led to economic disaster, with no where near enough young people to support and care for aging parents, or to keep the economy in general growing.
Worse, because of a cultural preference for boys, baby girls are aborted or abandoned at a horrifying rate. According to the Reuters article, “About 118 boys are born for every 100 girls, against a global average of 103-107 boys per 100 girls.” In a country with a population of 1.354 billion, that is a lot of dead baby girls.
And of course there are so many horror stories of women being legally beaten, tortured and forcibly aborted for the crime of getting pregnant twice. I know you have seen them; I can’t bring myself to search for them now.
I hope and pray that we will see fewer of these stories, although I am sure that any change will be small and gradual. What a hellish perversion of governance the one-child policy has been.
