Sunday Review

Chinese Officials Should Stop Trying to Limit Family Size

Editorial Board / New York Times | 31 October 2015

The Chinese government’s decision to end its draconian one-child policy is a pragmatic economic move, but it’s hardly sufficient. The government continues to control personal freedom by limiting the number of children a couple can have to two, an abhorrent policy that no nation should have.

The one-child policy, which was put in place in the late 1970s to limit the growth of the population, has distorted the economy and the society for decades. In fact, many demographers and economists say that the government made a big mistake, even aside from the morality of the policy, by enforcing it for as long as it did. China’s population is rapidly aging and the labor force has been shrinking in recent years.

Women have suffered greatly under the birth-control policy. The government long levied harsh fines for a second child. And in some parts of the country, officials subjected women to forced abortions and sterilizations for having more children than they were allowed. There is no sign that these practices won’t be used if a woman has more than two children under the new policy.

The one-child policy has left the country with many more men than women because the cultural preference for boys led families to practice sex selection during pregnancy and, in some cases, even committing infanticide. As early as 1990, Amartya Sen, the Nobel laureate in economics, estimated that China was missing 50 million women because of the one-child policy, lack of medical care, neglect and other reasons.

State-owned media reported that the government of President Xi Jinping is changing the policy to “balance population development and address the challenge of an aging population.” But most experts don’t expect a baby boom because having one child has increasingly become a preference as the cost of raising children, particularly in cities, rises. In 2013, the government eased the policy to let couples have two children if one parent was an only child. But experts say the number of couples wanting to have a second child has been lower than expected.

China’s Communist leaders rarely admit their mistakes, so the government described the policy change as a technical adjustment akin to how a central banker might raise or lower interest rates. Human life and reproductive freedom deserves more dignity than that.