Earlier today a surprising announcement was made by China’s Communist Party that the decades-old One-Child Policy was being lifted, allowing urban couples to have two children.

The proposal, which remains to be approved by China’s top legislature, was announced through the state-run Xinhua News Agency:

“To promote a balanced growth of population, China will continue to uphold the basic national policy of population control and improve its strategy on population development. China will fully implement the policy of ‘one couple, two children’ in a proactive response to the issue of an aging population.”

Human rights group Amnesty International is not yet ready to celebrate. “Couples that have two children could still be subjected to coercive and intrusive forms of contraception, and even forced abortions — which amount to torture.
The state has no business regulating how many children people have,” said China researcher William Nee.

Of course, this being Communist China, the reasons for the relaxation in this policy are not grounded in morals or altruism. Due to its attempts at social engineering, China has met with serious consequences for its One-Child Policy, as shown in this video:

The One-Child Policy has also resulted in horrendous abuses of human rights.

In 2013, Chinese expatriate writer Ma Jian published a novel focused upon the barbarity of the policy. Entitled The Dark Road, it is based upon Ma’s travels through the Chinese countryside, encountering families who had fled their homes in desperation to avoid the vicious family planning enforcers. I read The Dark Road when it was first published. It is a gritty book, not easy to read, and it does not have a cheery ending.

In a 2013 article for Britain’s The Guardian (London is where Ma Jian now resides) he described this horrific abortion forced upon a woman:

She told me she’d escaped Bobai with her husband and two daughters, and had been living on the river for almost two years. When I told her I had a three-year-old daughter, she smiled briefly. Then she stroked her large belly and, tears filling her eyes, told me that before she left Bobai she was given a forced abortion. The eight-month-old foetus was a boy. “He was still alive after the nurse pulled him out from me. He was a tough little creature. He clutched the nurse’s sleeve and wouldn’t let go. She had to peel his fingers off her one by one before she could drop him into the bin.”

Ma also interviewed an official from a local family planning center in the Guangdong region, and reported the following exchange:

“How do you know when a woman is menstruating?” I asked him.

“She has to report her cycles to the family planning monitor assigned to her street,” he said, his silhouette now black against the bright window.

“And how do they know she isn’t lying?”

“If the monitors suspect anything, they’ll rummage through the woman’s bins to check for soiled sanitary towels.”

“And what if you discover she’s fallen pregnant without permission?”

“We set to work on her.”

“What do you mean?”

“We persuade her to have an abortion. If she refuses, she must pay a fine – three times her annual salary. A few years ago, the county authorities insisted we meet our targets, so we couldn’t let anyone off. We had to round up every woman who was pregnant without permission and bring her here for a termination.”

Will China fully loosen the reins on married couples to allow them to have as many children as they like? The Communist Party in China has maintained such control over the lives of its citizens that I doubt that anything approaching full liberty for Chinese citizens who desire larger families will occur. As Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women’s Rights without Frontiers — a group dedicated to ending forced abortion in China — said in a press release:

…[I]nstituting a two-child policy will not end forced abortion, gendercide or family planning regulations in China.  Couples will still have to have a birth permit for the first and the second child, or they may be subject to forced abortion.  The core of the One Child Policy is not whether the number of children the government allows.  It’s the fact that the government is setting a limit on children, and enforcing this limit coercively.  That will not change under a two-child policy.  The One Child Policy does not need to be modified. It needs to be abolished.