China's Policy Should Be 'All Children,' Not One or Two
Writing several years ago in Foreign Affairs, the distinguished political economist and demographer Nicholas Eberstadt wrote that "By 2030, projections suggest that more than 25 percent of Chinese men in their late 30s will never have married. The coming marriage squeeze will likely be even more acute in the Chinese countryside, since the poor, uneducated, and rural population will be more likely to lose out in the competition for brides. Beijing will have to determine how it will cope with a growing demographic of unmarried, underprivileged, and, quite possibly, deeply discontented young men."
In 2012, The New York Times reported that the coercive abortion policy of China is beginning to have profound economic effects, as well:
… [E]conomists and business executives have expressed anxiety about the impact of a slowing population growth rate on the economy. Liang Jianzhang, a well-known executive with a doctoral degree in economics from Stanford University, and Li Jianxin, a demographer at Peking University, have estimated that by 2040, the number of Chinese older than 60 would be 411 million, up from 171 million today. The working population people between the ages of 20 and 60 would drop to 696 million from 817 million today.
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America is involved in these crimes, even if modestly. As reported in 2013 by Steven W. Mosher and Anne Roeback Morse of the Population Research Institute, "The United Nations Population Fund spent $4,861,000 in China last year for 'population dynamics programs,' 'family planning,' and other population control programs. The United States gave $30,200,000 to the UNFPA" in 2012.
This is wrong, as is federal funding of the now rightly notorious Planned Parenthood Federation of America, our country's leading purveyor of abortion and the recipient of roughly $500 million in taxpayer money annually.
What makes the change less than celebratory is something Florida Sen. Marco Rubio noted after the new policy was announced: China will still be rife with forced abortions:
While the decision to allow Chinese couples to have two children is a modest improvement, the policy is still repressive. The fact remains that when couples conceive a third child, the Chinese government will force them to eliminate him or her, by any means necessary. A two-child policy is as indefensible and inhumane as a one child policy, and it would be a mistake to assume this change in anyway reflects a newfound respect for human rights by Beijing.
Ironically, even President Obama's spokesman Josh Earnest said Friday during a White House media briefing, according to The Associated Press, "the U.S. is looking forward to the day when birth limits in China are abandoned altogether. Earnest says the U.S. will keep working around the world to end coercive birth policies such as forced abortion and sterilization. He says eliminating birth limits falls into the category of universal human rights."
Earnest is right, of course, yet how bittersweet coming from the chief spokesman for a president who has done more to advance unrestricted access to abortion-on-demand, federal subsidies for it, and rules requiring even an order of nuns to supply contraceptives.
Abortion, whether coercive or voluntary, is wrong morally. It is defiance against God's authorship of human life. It debases the dignity of the women who abort their children, and renders them prey to an abortion industry occupied with profit, not women's health. Forced abortion adds another layer to the evil of the act, certainly, by assailing women and rendering them subject to an aggressive, invasive, brutal state.
Yet all abortions have two results: Dead unborn babies and misused women. Whether in China or the U.S., the policies of anti-humanism and anti-theism at abortion's base must change.
