The Communist Chinese government’s Xinhua news agency announced today that the government is abolishing that country’s one-child policy.

The policy, which Susan Yoshihara, senior vice president for research at the Center for Family & Human Rights and co-editor of Population Decline and the Remaking of Great Power Politics has called “the world’s worst law,” “resulted in more murders than any other law in history,” according to Yoshihara—over 13 million abortions per year in China, many of them forced by government authorities, over the 35 years since the law went into effect.

It also resulted in the prevalence of sex-selection abortion leading to a huge imbalance in the male/female ratio in China, with the World Bank estimating 112 male births to every 100 female. As a result, China now has about 33 million more men of marriageable age than women, leading to high demand for pornography and prostitution, which in turn raise demand for sex trafficking.

The one-child law was driven by bogus fears of overpopulation resting on the anti-Christian worldview’s assumption that human beings are basically consumers and polluters, not the Christian worldview’s assumption that they are producers and stewards made in God’s image. Recently those fears have been augmented by exaggerated claims of dangerous, manmade global warming driven by use of fossil fuels for energy.

We can celebrate abolition of the policy. But only a little. Chinese law will still restrict most couples to no more than two children.

Where are the liberal defenders of reproductive freedom? Or do they defend only the freedom to kill babies in the womb, not the freedom to bear them to term and raise them as beloved children?

 

 

Featured image, “China’s One Child Policy Leading to Serious Gender Imbalances / One Woman Left,” courtesy of Surian Soosay, Creative Commons.