By Matt Turner
Tag: Children
Social Ramifications of the One-Child Policy
By A. Nichols
The One-Child Policy is not well understood by Americans. In a nation where the number of children in each family has never been controlled, it is difficult for its citizens to understand how the number of children they wish to have could be limited. This is why Americans view China’s One-Child Policy through a cloudy glass, understanding little of this complex policy and its social ramifications. The social issues caused by the One-Child Policy include abortion (forced and consented), as well as a rise in divorce rates, human trafficking, and gender imbalance.
Forced abortions have become a huge issue of human rights on the international stage. Many women have shared their testimonies on their involuntary abortions, and although there has been an effort to instate consent forms, they have not reached a useful point as of yet because many women are simply forced to sign the consent form. Ms. Feng is an example of one of these women. Unable to afford the fee for another child, Ms. Feng was dragged to the clinic where she was forced to sign the consent form before they gave her an injection in her belly. Abortion, besides being a major human rights issue, has other consequences. With the One-Child Policy has come pressure on women to give birth to boys.
Girls are less valuable, being unable to carry on the family name and less able, in the eyes of Chinese parents, to take care of their parents in old age. Because of this pressure, abortion and infanticide have become common, especially with female fetuses and infants. Among the seven million abortions every year, seventy percent are female. Because of these selective abortions, which are officially illegal but easily available, a gender imbalance has arisen in China. The imbalance has been growing steadily since the 1980’s and reached a ratio of 100 girls to every 117.8 boys in 2000, and is now approaching 100 girls to every 120 boys. The gender imbalance has amplified the amount of human trafficking in China. Many girls, called “stolen brides,” are stolen from their families and sold to villages without enough women.
This lack of available wives for the surplus of males is called the “bachelor crisis.” Divorce rates have also risen to one in every five marriages, an astonishing amount for a nation traditionally against divorce. Many men are pressured into leaving their wives if they are unable to bear a son, and many marriages fall apart under the stress of multiple abortions or the economic strain caused by the fees for second children. From abortion to human trafficking to divorce, the One-Child Policy has created a plethora of social issues that Americans have a limited knowledge and understanding of.
“The brutal truth; the one-child policy.” The Economist [US] 23 June 2012: 49(US). Academic OneFile. Web. 25 Oct. 2012
Patrick Shaou-Whea Dodge, Elizabeth A. Suter, “’It’s Okay to Have a Girl’: Patronymy and China’s One Child Policy.” Women and Language. Vol. 31, No. 1, Pg. 16.
Nakra, Prema. 2012. “China’s “One-Child” Policy: The Time for Change is Now!” World Future Review 4 (2): 134-140.
Nakra, Prema. 2012. “China’s “One-Child” Policy: The Time for Change is Now!” World Future Review 4 (2): 134-140.