China may scrap one-child policy

[maddezmom]

Source: Reuters

BEIJING (Reuters) - China, worried about an ageing population, is studying scrapping its controversial one-child policy but will not do away with family-planning policies altogether, a senior official said on Thursday.

With the world's biggest population straining scarce land, water and energy resources, China has enforced rules to restrict family size since the 1970s. Regulations vary but usually limit families to one child, or two in the countryside.

"We want incrementally to have this change," Vice Minister of the National Population and Family Planning Commission Zhao Baige told reporters in Beijing.

"I cannot answer at what time or how, but this has become a big issue among decision makers," Zhao said. She added that the current plan was to study the issue seriously and responsibly, but avoid sudden changes that might cause a spike in births.



Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080228/wl_nm/china_population_dc

[NMDemDist2]

1. gonna be tough to get a 'spike in births' with few women

the 'one child' law caused many families to abort girls and wait for a male child

This rule has caused a disdain for female infants; abortion, neglect, abandonment, and even infanticide have been known to occur to female infants. The result of such Draconian family planning has resulted in the disparate ratio of 114 males for every 100 females among babies from birth through children four years of age. Normally, 105 males are naturally born for every 100 females.

Now that millions of sibling-less people in China are now young adults in or nearing their child-bearing years, a special provision allows millions of couples to have two children legally. If a couple is composed of two people without siblings, then they may have two children of their own, thus preventing too dramatic of a population decrease.

http://geography.about.com/od/populationgeography/a/onechild.htm

[BearSquirrel2]

2. I got an idea ...

Why don't they allow young people from Mexico to emigrate to China to replace the young people escaping via cargo freighter to America.

[DainBramaged]

5. That's rough

[BearSquirrel2]

19. The truth hurts (nm)

[The Stranger]

3. Oh fuck. The planet is already being obliterated, and they're going to stop the one child policy?

Fucked, we are. Totally fucked.

[The Croquist]

6. I've got mixed feelings about this

The planet and China especially has too many people already but I hate the idea of this kind of government control.

[sofa king]

12. There is a better kind of government control.

Long ago the UN noticed that nations which provide equal rights and education for women experience a twofold benefit: production increases while reproduction drops.

No coercion is necessary, beyond forcing men to back the hell off. Women have the option to balance childbearing against career opportunity, and in the balance it seems they decide to have fewer children.

[The Stranger]

15. That is a great point, and I am assuming that includes providing BIRTH CONTROL to the women and men.

Many of the religious cults are preventing us from using our brains to preserve the planet and ourselves.

[sofa king]

30. Yeah, I think so.

I'm not sure if this is the correct view, but I tend to see birth control as an issue tightly tied to the rights of women. If the rights of women were gun ownership rights, I imagine birth control as the ammunition. Take the ammunition away, and now everyone just has fancy clubs.

[The Croquist]

18. I've seen similar numbers too

It is tragic that the more poverty there is in a society the greater the reproductive rate. I guess that the Chinese government either didn't think they had the time to allow rising standards of living to lower poverty or they simply didn't care.

[The Straight Story]

7. Oh I dunno, allowing women to control their own bodies used to be a liberal idea

Slowly, it is all sliding into government, and most likely, conservative control over peoples' lives.

It's no longer your body, it's ours...

[The Stranger]

16. I agree, but doubt that the women are the ones wanting to be baby factories.

They are probably happy with a small family, i.e., one child per family.

[PittPoliSci]

13. then do your part.

sterilize yourself.

[The Stranger]

14. Cute.

Actually, I'm amazed that it is seen as a government issue. If the religious cults and that jackass with all of the robes and the funny hat living in luxury in Rome would just let people use birth control that may be the answer for quite a bit of the third world.

For China, the problem is that they already have so many, many people.

Are you against birth control and contraception, PittPoliSci?

[PittPoliSci]

20. i'm not against birth control.

i'm against other people deciding what is right for other people. such that, I support the repeal of the one child law. responsible parents know how many children they can support, and should be free to support however many they choose. i don't buy into over-population arguments, seeing as they originate in the whole Club of Rome line of thinking.

[Megahurtz]

23. And how many "responsible parents" do you see

walking around with strings of kids?

[PittPoliSci]

28. who is to judge who is and who isn't responsible?

i'm just saying that if you can provide a standard of living for 4 kids as well as you can 2 or 1, you should be permitted to have 4 kids.

[bhikkhu]

26. That is a very "free market" argument.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I have to say that I am of the opinion that in this age it doesn't work.

People have little idea of the demands and constraints involved in the current level of population versus the carrying capacity of the planet. The customary historical remedy to a poorly applied "free market" approach to population is war, famine and epidemic. It has been to the great credit of the Chinese that they are the only modern country which has been realistic in its attempts to avoid the historical remedies.

[PittPoliSci]

29. i'm not sure how much of the "carrying capacity" arguments I can agree with.

based on much of what i've read, they stem from an elite upper-class population control perspective ala club of rome and stuff.

what i'm more interested in is better research and development so that the planet can indeed support more people. better technology leads to better standards of living. telling people who and how to screw doesn't. the whole "limited" resources argument bothers me to the core of my being. just 200 years ago nobody even considered oil a resource because nobody knew how to use it in a productive manner. with continued research and development the sky is the limit to what humanity can accomplish. kennedy's humanism is what made him such a unique and brilliant leader. his commitment to R&D was well documented, and set him apart in his belief in humanity's ability to morph the world around us to better suit our needs and increase our standard of living.

[bhikkhu]

33. Resources are limited and so there is a "carrying capacity"

That is the reality of our physical world. What that capacity is can be argued, but a belief in the limitless ability of science to produce limitless energy and goods for a limitless population is as irresponsible as numerous previous belief systems of numerous previous collapsed cultures...

I don't mean to rant or condescend, but I have lived on this planet long enough to realize that "rising tides" do not lift all ships, that the "developed world" is not leading the "developing world" to any level of stable prosperity, that there are more hungry and thirsty and sick people on this planet every year not because we are mean or greedy, but because resources are limited and populations keep expanding. It is not even economics, it is the reality of a small planet.

[PittPoliSci]

34. sorry.

don't buy it, and i don't want to live in a world where the sky is the limit.

[bhikkhu]

35. Well enough....

The world needs dreamers and "sky's the limit" hope, along with engineers and pragmatic realists to get along.

[Lorien]

17. Hey, I've done MY part and haven't had kids even though I've always wanted

a family. No sense in bringing another life into a dying planet (a death that each of us is responsible for). Each and every child born today faces an unbelievably horrific future, and I could never knowingly subject anyone to that.

[DainBramaged]

4. Baby factories

Don't worry, China will figure out a way to counterfeit kids too.

[OhioChick]

8. They Need More Workers

To Make the Cheap, Plastic, Tainted Shit to Sell to the US.

[saigon68]

9. LOL--- and Don't let them forget to paint it with Red Lead.

[OhioChick]

10. ....

:rofl:

[LibertyLover]

11. I honestly don't know what to say about this

I abhor the idea of being told what to do with my body (or anybody else's body) by the government, but I could understand the reason behind the "one child" policy. And it was the "one child" policy that made me a mother. My daughter was adopted from China. She was found, abandoned on a door step at approximately one day old, the result of the "one child" policy. However, knowing several young Chinese women of child bearing age, they are mostly leaning to one child. It will be interesting to see how this change in policy plays out over the years.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

21. Replacement level is 2.1 children per couple

However, one of the posters above was right: the countries with the highest number of educated women all have declining birth rates, sometimes below replacement level, including Italy and Japan.

There is a direct correlation between the average educational level of a country's women and its birth rate. Countries where most women are illiterate (e.g. Afghanistan) have high birth rates. Countries where almost all women have at least a high school education (e.g. Japan, with a 90% high school graduation rate) have low birth rates.

[customerserviceguy]

25. Industrialized societies have the lowest birthrates

and that goes hand in hand with educational opportunities for women, it's sort of a chicken-and-egg thing. China is becoming an industrialized society, and children are relatively more expensive in such societies, much more so than in predominantly agricultural ones.

While I decry Chinese made shoddiness as much as anybody, eventually their economy will grow out of it (as I recall, in the 1950's and even into the early 1960's Japanese goods were considered substandard) and China's population will stabilize for that reason.

[Megahurtz]

22. They BADLY need to do the one child policy here.

LOL.

[Xithras]

24. Actually, the US birthrate is just above replacement level.

People make a big deal about Europe's flat population, but if you look at the actual numbers you'll notice that the U.S. birthrate is about the same. The birthrates in Europe vary between 9-16 per 1000 people, depending on the nation. Spain is 10.8, France is 12.2, Iceland is 14.3, Ireland is 15.5, etc. Even China, with its One Child policy is down to 13.1. These are below replacement rate, and are considered to be exceptional numbers. The United States? 14.0. Higher than some European countries, but still within that replacement rate range and well within the anti-growth goals of most population control groups.

For the sake of comparison, the rate in Afghanistan is 48.2, in Uganda it's 46.6, in Kenya it's 39.2, in Nicaragua it's 24.9, and in Mexico it's 19.3. The global average is 20.3, and replacement rate is roughly 12.

Population growth in the U.S. today is primarily driven by immigration. Though our crude birthrate is about 2 births per 1000 above replacement rate and our population is slowly growing, the vast majority of national population growth has been driven by an influx of peoples from nations with rates much higher than ours.

The population control failures within the western world aren't caused by our inability to reduce our own birthrates, because we have done so spectacularly. Our failure has been our inability to export this success to the less affluent areas of the world.

[LeftyMom]

27. No sense selling the excess to Americans with the dollar falling.

Might as well keep 'em and put 'em to work.

[Akoto]

31. I'm really torn on this.

On the one hand, I can see why they had such a rule. Their country is packed and resources are limited. After a point, demand for the basics (food, water, living space) will exceed supply.

On the other hand, I don't feel that it's the government's place to control a woman's reproductive choices. As well, I don't think the law is fair to the offspring. That one child will be responsible later on for caring for both elderly parents, which is a heavy weight to carry alone, as I'm sure someone here can attest to.

[hedgehog]

32. You've hit the nail on the head about why the policy is changing.

It's not one person taking care of two elderly parents, it's an entire society of people caring for elderly parents. It's a problem world wide. Ultimately, all the arguments over Social Security boil down to how can so few workers support so many retired people? I see some practical problems awaiting us, such as how do all those elderly people manage when they're living in the suburbs and have their driver's licenses revoked? On the other hand, I see this as really a problem of managing wealth redistribution. We live in a society benefiting from a generous food supply, mass production and now the computer age. There's plenty for everyone, it's just a matter of figuring out how to spread things around.

[UncleSepp]

36. One, two, four

With people living longer, the one child policy results in four grandparents and two parents retired to one young worker, who may in turn be supporting one child of his own. Other countries with birth rates below replacement face the same issue. Whether children support their parents directly or as taxpayers, populations whose numbers are in decline have to deal with the math one way or the other.

One of the ways to deal with the issue is to spread things around a little less. Families living spread apart are harder to support than families living together. Generations under one roof, sharing resources, are more efficient than the postwar model of the nuclear family. I believe such living is also healthier, mentally and physically.

[meow2u3]

37. China may go with a TWO child policy

The third one will have to be aborted--or else!! Just watch!

[Anarcho-Socialist]

38. Let people have unlimited access to contraception and abortion

and let them choose how many children to have.