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Even China doesn’t want the one child policy anymore

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Beijing tries to put brakes on plummeting birth rates, reads the headline in today’s Vancouver Sun:

Wang Weijia and her husband grew up surrounded by propaganda posters lecturing them that “Mother Earth is too tired to sustain more children” and “One more baby means one more tomb.” They learned the lesson so well that when Shanghai government officials, alarmed by the city’s low birth rate and aging population, abruptly changed course this summer and began encouraging young couples to have more than one child, their reaction was instant and firm: No way.

“We have already given all our time and energy for just one child. We have none left for a second,” said Wang, 31, a human resources administrator with an eight-month-old son.

More than 30 years after China’s one-child policy was introduced, creating two generations of notoriously chubby, spoiled only children affectionately nicknamed “little emperors,” a population crisis is looming in the country.

It’s not about price point

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A clinic in China offers half price abortions to students who show their ID.

HalfPriceAbortions

At least in China abortion providers are honest about the fact that they’re running a business. North American abortion clinics, by contrast, dress themselves up in the robes of feminism, women’s health, and compassion, and sell quick fixes that wreak a lifetime of damage. 

If abortion providers marketed themselves as offering a service, rather than women’s saviours, perhaps they would not be so resistant to complying with basic safety regulations.

Scrambling in the propaganda ministry

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I wonder how to nuance this message? From Shanghai, China: Have more children, but only have one child. Good luck with that.

A birth rate that has crashed to .88 children per woman and a population ageing fast have led officials in the Chinese coastal city of Shanghai to start knocking on doors to get couples to have more children. But they are still straight-jacketed by the national one-child policy, so only certain “eligible” couples can expect a visit along with counselling and financial advice.

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Brigitte wonders: How exactly does the first activity (city officials knocking on doors) encourage the, er, desired activity (couples doing, ah, what’s needed to have more children)?

More from China

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There are cruel side effects to the one-child policy. There are also cruel side effects to our abortion-friendly policies here in Canada, but that’s the whole point of this blog. More on China specifically, here.

Even if the one-child policy had not had such cruel side effects, there would be good reason for abandoning it. Once a young society, China is aging fast. Demographers say it is the first country to grow old before growing rich.

I don’t think we are as outraged by this policy as we ought to be. Perhaps we’ve heard about it for too long, and it no longer takes hold. Women in China have employers checking their cycles and other such nonsense. I have a book on my table here called Population Control, by Steven Mosher, which I intend to read just as soon as I can. Whether China or Canada, we have to move away from this idea that people are a burden.

Missing in action

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Sex selection abortion in China has come up again. This of course happens in Canada too and there’s nothing we can do to prevent it, so long as choice mantras dominate the debate. We prefer not to discuss it, because we’d be forced to acknowledge that there are public ramifications to abortion. If we discussed it, we’d also be forced to admit there are indeed very bad reasons for having an abortion. And apparently acknowledging one bad reason to have an abortion topples the whole house of cards. So let me ask the question we are actually asking by remaining silent: Who really cares about 32 million missing women, anyway? (China is far away, and this is not our problem.)

That delicate balance

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Environmentalist are always going on about how, when we as humans fiddle with one thing, there’s always an unforeseen and often negative chain reaction.

Like antibacterial soap.  Because we’re so obsessed with being clean, we’ve managed to aid in the evolution of antibacterial resistant strains.  Next step:  we invent stronger antibacterial soap, and bacteria in turn becomes resistant to that (and so on until it becomes the stuff of Dr Who episodes).

So what happens when we try to control the sex of our offspring (through, say, sex-selection abortion)?  Wouldn’t you know that we’re all wired up to keep that male to female ratio pretty much even.

When females are in short supply, they have a better chance of snagging a mate, and are thus more likely to pass the gene for fathering daughters on to their offspring. And when men are scarce, they have a better chance of mating and passing along the gene for having sons.

“It’s kind of a counterbalancing mechanism,” Gellatly explained in an interview. “You can’t get a population that becomes too skewed toward males or too skewed toward females.”

Makes for an interesting scenario in a country like China where there are 120 males for every 100 females.  If the science is accurate, more women will become pregnant with girls than boys.  And if the Chinese stay true to their traditions, the increase in number of abortions performed will be exponential.

Lest we forget

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What with the Olympics and all, it it always a good time to remember the brutality of Chinese Communism:

Arzigul Tursun, six months pregnant with her third child, is under guard in a hospital in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region, scheduled to undergo an abortion against her will because authorities say she is entitled to only two children, according to the Uyghur Human Rights Project.

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Rebecca asks: Why is this woman not eligible for refugee status somewhere in the civilized world?

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HAPPY UPDATE: It appears she has been released – without having to undergo the abortion – because of international pressure.

Driving me to despair–or China

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The only thing more alarming than this poll question is the result (at time of posting, “yes” and “no” are neck in neck):

Drivers in Beijing have been forced to give up their cars every second day in hopes of reducing smog. Should Canadian cities take a similar approach?

I have a different poll question: “Should Canada drop democracy in favour of a “strong hand,” someone who will be able to decree that pollution, crime,  even abortion levels, should fall?”

Dictators, getting things done. How ’bout it, Canada?

Earthquakes and family policy

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Stories like this highlight the injustice of Communist China’s one child policy. We forget about the horrible nature of this repressive regime–and extreme family planners in North America are so keen on curbing population growth that they almost never comment on the substantial injustice and curtailing of freedom that tells parents they can’t have as many kids as they want. (They also respond to natural disasters with condoms, but that deserves a post of its own.) Folks–Malthus is dead, literally and figuratively.

The May 12 quake was particularly painful to many Chinese because it killed so many only children. …

If the couple’s legally born child is killed and the couple is left with an illegally born child under the age of 18, that child can be registered as the legal child — an important move that gives the child previously denied rights including free nine years of compulsory education.

China: Are we there yet?

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In recent news, not so much abortion but morality, particularly the kind or morality — or lack thereof — found in today’s movies. The artistic community has its nose out of joint in light of a new bill that would give the federal Heritage Department the power to deny funding for films or tv shows it considers offensive. At least, that’s what the CBC tells us. Driving with the radio on, I was treated to much weeping and gnashing of teeth from concerned artists promising a descent into China-styled censorship and the end of audacious, creative movies — by which they must mean movies that cannot get a message across without repeated appeals to sexually graphic images, gratuitous violence and other delicious morsels of entertainment.

When they say “deny funding” what they mean is deny a tax credit. A tax credit worth 11% of salaries paid to Canadian employees in the making of the movie. What this means, really, is that offensive movies will still be created, produced and distributed in Canada, only that offensive movie-makers will have to do it on their own dime. Which they already did, strictly speaking, since a credit reimburses money already spent on salaries.

China is not around the corner. Not because of this bill, in any case. 

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Rebecca adds: … but why expect Canada’s chattering classes to grasp this rather unsubtle difference? After all, the suggestion that we not use taxpayer dollars to fund elective abortions inevitably results in protests that evil conservatives want to create a world of back alley abortions, in which doctors and women in desperate straits are thrown in jail. Just as the body politic increasingly wants everything undesirable to be criminalized, so it wants everything legally permitted to be federally funded.

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