Demographic disaster

China’s new two-child policy is less than a year old, but won’t stem the rising tide of human rights abuses despite the Vatican’s diplomatic efforts.

It can be tempting to see China allowing married couples to now have two children as a positive step on the path to greater personal liberty, but Steven Mosher takes a more jaundiced view.

“What’s happened is that the Chinese Communist Party has decided to increase the production of babies, just like it decides to increase the production of tanks and guided missile destroyers,” said Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute, a Virginia-based nonprofit that challenges global overpopulation theories and spotlights human rights abuses in population control programs.

Forced abortions

A member of Legatus’ Northern Virginia Chapter, Mosher was the first American social scientist to visit Communist China in 1979. Under the aegis of the one-child policy, Mosher saw Chinese women taken into custody and forced to have abortions. Almost 40 years later, he argues, China has not abandoned its underlying philosophy that the state — not people — controls human reproduction. He envisions a future where the Chinese government may even force couples to have children against their will.

“That sounds bizarre, doesn’t it?” Mosher asked. “But is the planned birth policy anything other than taking from parents the natural right to decide the number of children they will raise and putting it in the hands of a government agency?”

China’s new two-child policy took effect on Jan. 1, 2016. Official state media reported the pending change last year as communist authorities sought to address some troubling demographic trends in the nation of 1.4 billion people.

China’s population is aging. According to United Nations estimates, the over-60 population will more than double to 437 million by 2050. At the same time, the national workforce is shrinking, and it is expected to continue falling for the next 15 years. Meanwhile, its one-child policy over 40 years has created a crippling imbalance in the numbers of Chinese men and women because many couples chose to abort female babies to raise boys who could be wage earners.

“The Chinese Communist Party has created for itself a demographic disaster with its one-child policy,” said Reggie Littlejohn, founder and president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, a coalition of human rights activists and organizations that lobby against forced abortions, gendercide and sexual slavery in China.

Littlejohn … said Women’s Rights Without Frontiers recently filed a complaint against China with the United Nations, alleging continued coercion and human rights abuses under the new two-child policy. The complaint notes several recent examples, including the story of a Guangdong couple who had been warned by authorities to abort their unborn child or lose their government jobs. The wife was eight months pregnant, according to state media reports.

“The Chinese Communist Party never said they were ending forced abortions or forced sterilizations. The two-child policy is their way to address the demographic disaster while keeping control over the population,” said Littlejohn, who quoted blind Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng. On Twitter, Guangcheng said China previously killed any couple’s second child.

“Now, they will kill any baby after two,” Littlejohn said. “In China, they boast that more than 400 million lives have been prevented by abortion because of the one-child policy. This is a massive problem. When you realize that one-fifth of the world’s population lives under this policy, this is the biggest human rights and women’s issue in the world today.”

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