Bye Bye BirdieA Holocaust of the Children
Uploaded by Jenlee on Jan 31, 2006
If the United States government implemented a law that told couples they could only have one child, how soon would a protest be in place? The answer is immediately, because it is not the government’s place to restrict the reproductive rights of any human being. However, this atrocity is taking place in China at this very moment. This law is known as the one-child law.
This policy was introduced by Chairman Mao to help ensure that the flood prone, famine-ridden China could feed its people by reducing its population (China Steps Up). The one-child policy essentially states that couples living in the cities may only have one-child, unless one or both of the couples are from an ethnic minority, or they are both only children, in which case they my have two. In most rural areas a couple my have a second child after a break of seven to ten years. These exceptions are allowed in order to keep the population from having a dramatic recession (China Steps Up).
Those who live within the city and have more than one child must abide by the extra birth policy, which requires that the couple must pay an extra tax for the apparent burden they impose on society, because they will use more of communist China’s public resources, which is said to be unfair to those who follow the one-child law (No Relaxation). The regulations also prohibit single women who become pregnant from giving birth (China’s “One Child” Policy Coercive). According to the Chinese government “The one child policy has proven, overall, to be successful in having kept approximately two hundred and fifty million births from happening since 1979,” (China Steps Up) however, at what cost does this so called success take place?
One of the most noticeable problems with the one child law is the ratio of men to women; there are approximately one hundred and fifty two males for every one hundred females, all in all that’s about sixty million more men than women (China Steps Up). China’s fertility rate, statistically, is 1.8, which is greater than Germany’s 1.2, but below that of the United States’ 2.1 (China’s One Child Rule). The unbalanced ratio is caused by two factors, the first being that there are naturally one hundred and five males born from every one hundred females. The second, because there...