Ya-marie Sesay | Staff Writer
China’s one child policy has had a great effect on the scarcity of young people and gender imbalance, according to government estimates China’s birth rate has fallen short.
China’s one child policy ended in late 2015, and since then china’s birth rate last year was the highest this century. In 2016 births increased by 7.9 percent to 17.86 million according to China’s National Health and Family Planning Commission, 45 percent of those children were born to families that already had one child.
The one child policy was a population planning policy established in the 1980’s in order to restrict the population growth. The need for stabilization of water supply, food, and individual prosperity led to the end of the birth rate of four children per family.
Only families with females as their first child in the western area were allowed to have a second child. The goal of the one child policy is to ensure the population remains below 1.2 billion at the end of the 20th centuries.
Women must be regularly checked, and were forced to have an abortion or be sterilized if found pregnant. Families with other children had to pay, usually a multiple of the average income in the city where the child is born, designed to cover the cost of education and healthcare.
“I understand the reason for the one child policy but I do not believe that it was fair, and now they are facing the consequences of not having enough children to continue the next generation. I’m glad they uplifted the law but it’s going to take time for them to catch up to their expectations.”
Harris went on to say, “ Also people are so used to the one child policy that they may not even want to have any more kids because that’s all they can afford. Maybe the government should develop a form of government assistance to encourage people to have more children. When people feel financially secure they will have more children,” Alexis Harris, a junior Kinesiology major from Chicago.
Since the law has been uplifted the family planning commission expects 17 to 20 million births a year until the year 2020. The number of childbearing women will decline by 5 million due to age according to officials.
By 2020 the population is estimated to be 1.42 billion from 1.37 billion at the end of 2015.
Majority of families have adjusted to the one child policy therefore 75% of families do not want to have a second child due to economic reasons based on surveys taken by the family planning commission.
The Hampton Script 