China’s one-child policy has many odious dimensions, but the most gruesome aspect of this type of “family planning” is the murder of millions of infant girls.
As a result, the ratio of males to females in China is unnaturally high, hovering between 117 to 119 boys for every 100 girls in 2000, according to China Daily and People’s Daily. There are one-fifth more boys than girls because girls are so often aborted or killed after delivery.
Chinese officials have in the past boasted about preventing 300 million births since the one-child policy was implemented in the late 1970s, and for this they have often received the accolades of Western “family planning” supporters–including, sadly, feminists–who see “overpopulation” as a threat right up there with global warming. The Bush Administration has been the target of bien-pensants from Brussels to Hollywood for withholding support from the United Nations Population Fund, an agency that operates in China despite the coercive nature of the one-child policy.
But now even Chinese officials are starting to admit that the vast majority of these 300 million were girls. So bad have things become that the government has finally started to worry, and earlier this month announced a raft of new programs to reverse the trend. The National Population and Family Planning Commission launched a pilot project called “Care for Girls,” which will experiment with incentives in some parts of the country.
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China seems to have learned the hard way what the one-child program can produce. Because it was first imposed in the late 1970s, men in their 20s are having to deal with the harsh reality of six bachelors for every five potential brides. There are numerous reports of kidnappings of women across the country as frustrated men try any means to procure wives. As a new generation of (mostly male) Chinese move into positions of authority, they have an incentive to correct the gender imbalance.
A penny short and a day late, wouldn’t you say?