China’s two-child policy as evil as their one-child policy

Recently, the Communist Party of China announced they will now allow all couples to have two children. For decades, China used forced abortions, forced sterilizations, extreme fines and other violence against individuals to ruthlessly enforce a policy which limited couples to only having one child. This evil policy has directly led to millions of sex-selection abortions in a country where many families favor boys over girls.

It should be made clear that China is not changing from a one-child policy to a two-child policy because their conscience was awakened after decades of gross violations of human rights. Rather, China changed their policy because they could no longer ignore the future demographic and economic nightmare they are facing. The percentage of elderly members of their population is dramatically rising and the number of workers is shrinking.

Writer Joel Kotkin, whose work focuses on demographics, detailed this crisis:

“Perhaps the most troubling impact will be on the workforce. In 2050, the number of children in China under 15 is expected to be 60 million lower than today, approximately the size of Italy’s population. It will gain nearly 190 million people 65 and over, approximately the population of Pakistan, which is the world’s sixth most populous country.”

China’s population control scheme not only hurt their society’s future, but they had to hurt their own citizens to carry it out.

The atrocities of the one-child policy made worldwide headlines in 2012 when Chen Guangcheng, the blind lawyer, arrived at the American embassy in China. He had been imprisoned in his own home and beaten for exposing how China subjected hundreds of thousands of women in his Shandong region to forced abortions and forced sterilizations. Chen made a daring escape—totally blind and with a broken foot—and eventually made it to the American embassy with the help of friends. Chen and his family were eventually allowed to leave China with the help of the U.S. government.

Responding to China’s announced change, Chen noted that women and their families in China will still face harsh penalties if they do not abide by China’s two-child policy:

“At a time when the law in China specifically forbade violent or coercive practices in enforcing population control, I found that officials were regularly breaking into people’s homes, destroying and confiscating property, and dragging away pregnant women to undergo abortions against their will.

“It is clear, though, that simply changing the number of ‘allowed’ children will never result in real changes on the ground. Now, the emphasis will be simply on eliminating a third child, as they used to do with the second child, and collecting as many fines as possible along the way.”

China’s policy change is likely too late to stave off their demographic crisis, and certainly cannot make up for a missing generation of girls and the horrible injustices their parents were forced to endure.