China’s One Child Policy – Is it Similar to what’s Happening in the U.S.?

China’s One Child Policy – Is it Similar to what’s Happening in the U.S.?

I’d like to thank my daughter for coming up with the idea for this post and for contributing to its writing.

‘It was the best of times’

Though there has been a worldwide recession for the last couple of years, the People’s Republic of China (China) has seen unprecedented economic growth.

Extrapolating past real GDP growth rates into the future, the size of the Chinese economy surpasses that of the U.S. in purchasing power terms between 2012 and 2015; by 2025, China is likely to be the world's largest economic power by almost any measure. It has the third largest gross domestic product in the world

The United States also enjoys great prosperity. In fact it boasts the greatest gross domestic product in the world

‘It was the worst of times’

Due to societal, economic, and governmental limitations, both countries have imposed restrictions on the rights of citizens to sexually reproduce. Though the approaches in the two countries have differences in regard to the methodology, there are significant similarities.

One Child Policy in China

According the British  Medical Journal, “After a century of rebellions, wars, epidemics, and the collapse of imperial authority, during which the annual population growth was probably no more than 0.3%,... (the expansion of the population) was initially seen as part of China’s new strength. Mao Zedong quoted a traditional saying: ‘Of all things in the world, people are the most precious.’”

China’s perceived problems with overpopulation can be traced back to 1958 when Mao announced the Great Leap Forward, which was both a social and economic program. Though China’s current economic growth is likely related to its embrace of capitalism, in 1958 Mao’s goal was to rapidly convert China into a modern industrial state through collectivism. Unfortunately for China, it was an economic disaster. 

Communities throughout China were collectivized and converted from farming to industrial occupations such as steel production. Due to their failed economic policy, food supply slipped behind population growth. An ensuing famine in 1962 led to an estimated 30 million deaths.

In time, many of the excesses of the Great Leap Forward and Mao’s Cultural Revolution were recognized; however, the country retained its centralized economy. Rapid population growth only added to the burden the government had to serve its people.  Instead of attributing the country’s supply shortfall problems on the nature of its economy, the leaders who had a strong ideological faith in communism, blamed the country’s problems on excessive demand. The problem was adjudged to be too many people rather than an inefficient use of resources. In 1970 the government’s five year economic plan included targets for controlling the population growth rate. New initiatives were introduced that provided contraceptive devices and abortion services. The government also promoted marriage for later in life, longer intervals between births, and smaller families. The rate of increase of the population growth began to decrease.

Though the government conceded that a large labor force was important to economic development, the government also believed that a continued rapid population growth contributed to unemployment due to the surplus labor. Overpopulation was believed to be a strain on the limited availability of both natural and economic resources. Finally, in 1979 the government introduced the One Child Policy that limited couples to having only one child, though certain exceptions were allowed.

When translated, the name for The One Child policy is “policy of birth planning.” In September 1980, the Central Committee of the Communist party stated that the measures would be in place for 30 years, by which time it stated that the population pressure would have been alleviated.

There are many in the West who feel that the program has been a great success. According to James H. Scheuer, a former New York representative to the U.S. House of Representatives, “If China had not instituted a comprehensive family planning effort in the 1960's, including the controversial one child per family policy, unchecked population growth, stimulated in part by improved child health care and the accompanying reduction in maternal and child deaths, would have pushed the population by the year 2025 to an estimated 5.2 billion -a sum far exceeding today's total world population. China recognized the horrifying effects of a population explosion caused by an average six child family and set in motion a family planning program that touches every facet of life.”

Since the introduction of the One Child Program there have been some changes in regard to its implementation and some exceptions have been added, but for the most part there haven’t been any sweeping changes.

The One Child Policy rests heavily upon universal access to contraception and abortion. The policy officially restricts the number of children couples can have to one, although exemptions are provided for:

• Parents in 17 provinces who are allowed to have a second child if their first is a girl, but generally only after waiting five years;
• Parents In two provinces who are allowed two children regardless of the sex of the first child;
• Parents with a first child who is certified by a doctor as being handicapped;
• Urban parents who were both from single-child families; and

·         Though some aspects of the policy may be considered discriminatory, it should be noted in fairness that the Han majority is the most restricted. Generally, minority groups such as Tibetans, Miao and Mongols are permitted additional exceptions.

There is conflicting data regarding the percentage of the population that is subject to restrictions. Estimates range from 35.9 percent to 63 percent.

For centuries Chinese culture had centered upon the family. Understandably, not every married couple enthusiastically accepted the limit of having only one child. According to Yemlibike Fatkulin:

“I have been a student of China's one-child policy since the late 1970s, when I became the first American social scientist to conduct a full-length study of a Chinese village. From 1979 to 1980, I lived in rural Guangdong. At the beginning of 1980, the Guangdong provincial government secretly ordered a 1 percent cap on population growth for the year. Local officials had complied the only way they could-by launching a family planning "high tide" soon thereafter to terminate as many pregnancies as possible. The rules governing this high tide were simple: No woman was to be allowed to bear a second child within four years of her first, and third children were strictly forbidden. Furthermore, all women who had borne three or more children by November 1, 1979, were to be sterilized. Over the next few weeks I became an eyewitness to every aspect of this draconian campaign. I went with young women to family planning "study sessions" and saw them harangued and threatened by senior Party officials. I followed them as they were taken under escort to the commune clinic and watched-with the permission of local officials who were eager to demonstrate their prowess in birth control to a visiting foreigner-as they were aborted and sterilized.”

In one rural county, in the early years of the policy, parents were required to obtain a permit before having a baby. Women were fitted with IUDs after their first child and sterilized after their second. In other counties, couples are still required to obtain a permit before having a second child. If they have a second child without a permit, they can be fined thousands of dollars.

The Chinese government has admitted that at first there were some abuses and they blamed those on overzealous local officials. They claim that such instances are increasingly infrequent. In 2002, China outlawed the use of physical force to make a woman submit to an abortion or sterilization, though there are still multiple media reports of ill-treatment. For example, in September 2000, it was reported that Chinese police arrested three officials who caused the death of a baby while enforcing the policy. Women who have unapproved pregnancies are reportedly reluctant to seek obstetric care because they fear they will face pressure to have abortions or will be fined.The policy is enforced with both positive and negative economic incentives. Some positive incentives include :

• Longer maternity leaves and other benefits to parents who delay having children;
• Individuals volunteering to have only one child are awarded a "Certificate of Honor for Single-Child Parents.

Though there are fines that are significant for most working people, for the growing class of wealthy Chinese capitalists, the fines are more than affordable. This has resulted in limitations on the poor and privileges for the bourgeoisie – the “haves” and “have-nots.” The wealthy also have additional opportunities to get around the policy. According to the policy, when Chinese women have children overseas, the child is not counted against them. It is therefore popular for China’s emerging bourgeoisie to give birth to their second children in foreign countries. 

Unintended Consequences

In Chinese culture, sons were traditionally considered more desirable than daughters because in rural areas sons tended to be more useful in assisting with farm work. Also, parents traditionally depended upon sons to take care of them in their old age. Finally, many parents hope that a son will carry on the family line. When Chinese parents are forced to have only one child, most of them prefer to have a son.

The more wealthy Chinese, who prefer boys, can afford to find out the sex of their unborn children. Since more parents are able to determine the sex of the unborn, there is a there is a significant trend for them to abort females. Working class parents must wait until the birth of the child. If it is a female, the child may be abandoned, unregistered, or killed outright. Fortunately, many of the orphaned Chinese girls are adopted by couples in other countries, including the United States.

The gender preference has resulted in a society that has a greater proportion of males than females. “By 2020, some 30 million Chinese men will find it well-nigh impossible to find a bride as a result of a rising gender imbalance… For every 100 baby girls born in 2005, there were 118.58 baby boys, and the gap will continue to widen,” said the report by the State Population and Family Planning Commission.

Independent scholars and scientists estimate that the program has prevented about 250 million births. 250 million human beings will never get the chance to grow up to be teachers, scientists, inventors, or priests.

It is unclear as to whether the One Child Policy will remain in place permanently. China's National Population and Family Planning Commission has said that the policy will remain in place for at least another decade. On the other hand, An editorial in the Communist Party newspaper, The People's Daily, said, “We cannot just be content with the current success, we must make population control a permanent policy.

There are also many Western supporters of the policy. According to the Financial Post, “China has proven that birth restriction is smart policy. Its middle class grows, all its citizens have housing, health care, education and food, and the one out of five human beings who live there are not overpopulating the planet.”

Perceived "Population Explosion" in the West

There have been “experts” predicting that due to the exponential growth of population, the world’s resources would soon run out since at least 1798 when Robert Malthus wrote that there would soon be starvation in Great Britain.

Probably our generation’s concerns about overpopulation can be traced back to the Club of Rome’s 1972 book, The Limits to Growth. The book sold over 9 million copies and was translated into 28 languages. It was used as a textbook in schoolrooms throughout the country. It was a required text for me in one of my college courses. The book claimed that population was expanding at a geometric rate, while agriculture productivity was increasing only at a constant rate. Worse yet, natural resources were finite and would eventually be depleted. According to the Club of Rome, the ideal sustainable population was between 500 million and 1 billion people. Currently, the world population is 6.7 billion. The book also stated that only 550 billion barrels of untapped oil remained and that that would run out by 1990. Though, most concede that the computer models used by the Club of Rome were flawed, many, if not most people still believe that overpopulation is a serious problem.

In the West, the prevailing misconception that overpopulation is a problem is often linked to a concern over the environment. David Brower, the first Executive Director of the Sierra Club was quoted as saying, “Childbearing (should be) a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license. All potential parents (should be) required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.” According to environmentalist, Garrett Hardin, the “freedom to breed is intolerable.”

Though most people don’t have beliefs quite as drastic as Brower or Hardin, most people continue to believe overpopulation as a problem that needs to be solved.

Even Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was quoted in an interview with the New York Times as saying, “Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”

Parallels between China and the United States

Although there are different methods of population control in China and the United States, there are significant parallels.

Like China, the United States experienced a high rate of population growth in the 1950s and early 1960s. In the United States this was called the baby boom.

In 1970 the Chinese government’s economic five year plan included initiatives for government provided contraceptive and abortion services. In 1973 The U.S. Supreme Court issued the infamouse Roe v. Wade decision, which legalized abortion. The case paved way for legislation for Medicaid funding for abortions, though most states have since halted such funding.

The One Child Policy has slowed the rate of the increase in population in China. However, its population may not be problematic as some claim.

“China is not the country with the most serious population problems in the world but its population control is the most draconian,” said one commentator. “Even if we only consider Asia, there are at least three counters with bigger population density than China - Japan, South Korea and Israel. In Europe, one third of the countries are more densely populated than China. Are more strict measures really needed?”

The perceived problem of overpopulation in the United States has also been overstated. The total population in the United States is only growing due to immigration. Outside of immigration, the population in the United States is actually decreasing. This situation is not unique to the United States. Every industrialized country in the world is also below the replacement level.

Both China and the United States use similar euphemisms. The Chinese term for One Child policy is “policy of birth planning.” In America, the largest provider of abortions uses a similar name - Planned Parenthood. Incredibly, despite the fact that the majority of citizens in the United States oppose abortion, and despite the fact that we are in the midst of the worst budget deficit in history, Planned Parenthood receives about one third of its funding from the government in the form of grants and contracts. In 2008 it received $349.6 million from the U.S, government.

There are financial disincentives in both China and the United States that discourage parents from having multiple children. In addition to fines noted above, Chinese parents who have multiple children are not given the same benefits as parents with only one child. Also in some parts of China school fees for one child are 27 percent of the average family’s total budget. School costs are also a burden on large families in the United States. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that most families will pay about $291,570 to raise a child to age 18.

The population of China is estimated to be about 1.3 billion people. As noted earlier, it is estimated that its One Child Policy has prevented about 250 million births. The number of people that have been aborted or contracepted under the policy is therefore 19.2 percent of China’s current population. The United States’ population is estimated to be 308,867,639. Since Roe vs. Wade, there have been an estimated 50 million abortions performed in the United States. The number of people aborted in the United States since Roe vs. Wade is 16.2 percent of the United State’s current population. That percentage doesn’t even include the number of births prevented because of contraception. It is therefore extremely likely that with contraception, the United States has prevented more births, as a proportion of total population, than China.

In both countries birth control efforts include eugenic aspects. In a purported effort to reduce birth defects in China, both partners had to be tested before they marry. If either person was judged to be unsatisfactory either physically physical or mentally, they were banned from marrying. Mental issues that were considered ranged from dyslexia to schizophrenia. It is noted that China has since modified this policy. In the United States, there are many who claim that the nation’s health care policies and government funding target the decreased fertility of African-Americans. As noted above, in recent years, Medicaid funding for abortion has been cut. However, when Medicaid funding was prevalent, from 1982 to 1992, it had a much greater impact on the fertility of African-Americans than for Caucasians. 

According to Wikipedia, Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood was Sanger was a proponent of eugenics. Sanger's eugenic policies ran to an exclusionary immigration policy and compulsory segregation or sterilization for the profoundly retarded. She also wrote, “Apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.”

Interestingly, Hillary Clinton, the U.S. Secretary of State has compared Margaret Sanger to Thomas Jefferson and said, “I admire Margaret Sanger being a pioneer in trying to empower women to have some control over their bodies…”

Planned Parenthood has been accused of intentionally concentrating its clinics in African-American neighborhoods. For example, according to the Center for Disease Control, in 2006 57.4 percent of the abortions in the state of Georgia were performed on African-American women, even though African-Americans make up only 30 percent of the population. In a much publicized recent anti-abortion campaign, scores of billboards in Georgia bear the message: “Black children are an endangered species.”

As noted above, in China, there is a negative stigma and negative peer pressure attached to parents with multiple children. While large families were once common in the United States, they are now considered unusual and peculiar. Parents of large families often receive subtle criticisms from their peers and neighbors when the size of their families is discussed. Most of it may not mean-spirited, but it is still insulting. One article discussing a much-publicized large family, the Duggars, is entitled “The Duggar Family America's Creepiest Family?”

Conclusion

Just as the Club of Rome miscalculated the depletion of oil resources, it also miscalculated human population growth. According to Priests For Life, The policies of China, the United States, and most industrialized countries “stand in total contradiction to the actual demographic trends, as they are revealed in statistics and the analysis of available data. For thirty years, the rate of growth of world's population has continued to decline at a regular and significant rate. At this point, following an impressive drop in their fertility, 51 countries in the world (out of 185) are no longer able to replace their population. To be precise, these 51 countries represent 44% of the population of the world. In other words, the synthetic index of fertility in these countries, that is to say, the number of children born of each woman, is lower than 2.1. This is the minimum level of fertility needed for the replacement of the population in a country which has the optimum public health conditions.”

Natural law requires the creation and protection of life. Abortion does not to protect life. Its supporters claim that it “improve the quality of life” for those who are already living. However, the supposition that abortion benefits a nation’s economy is improvable. In fact, an excellent case can be made to the contrary. The growth of the Chinese economy is more likely due to the shift to capitalism than it is due to population control. Along with capitalism, it has been the large workforce and its talents that allowed China to emerge from poverty. Openness to life could be an even greater social and economic resource.

 Since Roe v. Wade, the economy of the United States has declined in proportion to the rest of the industrialized world. This may well be due to our falling birth rate. The decline in births has led to a “graying” of our population and that is placing a strain on social welfare systems such as social security. Increasingly, there are fewer young people to support the elderly. The losses in population have reduced the availability of skilled labor and also narrowed the “brain pool” upon which new innovations could be devised.

According to Life Site News:

Researcher Dennis M. Howard, president of the pro-life group Movement for a Better America, who has been tracking the economic impact of abortion since 1995, has shown that the 50.5 million surgical abortions since 1970 have cost the U.S. $35 trillion dollars in lost Gross Domestic Product (GDP). If the number of missing children includes those aborted by IUDs, RU-486, sterilization and abortifacients, the figure climbs to over $70 trillion. Originally calculating losses in ‘downstream tax revenues as an index of the cost of abortion,’ which showed only government revenue loss, Howard then turned to using lost GDP (GDP per capita per year times the cumulative number of abortions since 1970) as a measure of total economic cost. ‘No matter how you slice it, aggressive “population control” exacts a huge price in future economic growth that can never be recovered. 

Before he caved-in on health care “reform,” U.S. Congressman Bart Stupak was quoted as saying, “Party leaders don't want this effort (to include anti-abortion language in the health care bill) to succeed.  ‘If you pass the Stupak amendment, more children will be born, and therefore it will cost us millions more. That's one of the arguments I've been hearing. …Money is their hang-up. Is this how we now value life in America? If money is the issue - come on, we can find room in the budget. This is life we're talking about.”

Abortion and contraception not only damages countries. It damages individuals. With the possibility of life removed from human sexuality it is reduced to being only pleasure or entertainment. This impoverishes and disregards the deeper meaning of sexuality. Divorced from the ultimate manifestation of love, couples are merely using one another. Denying life is violation of natural law and it is irresponsible to view sexuality as merely a source of recreation, and to regulate it through strategies of mandatory birth control. This materialistic approach in both China and the United States has led to women being subjected to a variety of forms of violence or abuse. It should be up to couples to determine and exercise their sexuality, and not the State and its restrictive policies, or society and its pressures.