China’s Population Control
Environmental extremists have for years called on governments enact policies to reduce the growth of the human population to prevent the complete exhaustion of scarce resources and a declining quality of life for the average person. Contrary to what the environmentalists have predicted, resources are becoming more abundant and quality of life for the average person across the globe has been improving. Thankfully their recommendations for population control were not taken seriously in the United States or Europe. Unfortunately, China took the warnings of these environmentalists seriously and destroyed many lives in the process. China’s one-child policy—which lasted from 1979 to 2015—was designed to reduce the Chinese population by punishing women who gave birth to more than one child. They implemented this policy under the false belief that an increasing population would drain China’s scarce resources. Chelsea Follett from the Cato Institute describes the human rights abuses of the Chinese government in some detail. The one-child policy was enforced through the termination of pregnancies, massive fines, mandated pregnancy tests, forced international adoption, and robbing and destroying private property. Local government officials were penalized for not maintaining the one-child quota and were rewarded bonuses for sterilizing women. Follett describes the scale of the sterilization campaigns, stating that between 1979 and 2015, the Chinese government had “over 300 million Chinese women fitted with intrauterine devices modified to be irremovable without survey, over 100 million sterilizations, and over 300 million abortions. Many of these procedures were coerced” (p. 1). In 2017, the UN estimated that “18.3 percent of Chinese women aged 15-49 had been permanently sterilized” (p. 9).
Reference
Chelsea Follett (2020). Neo-Malthusianism and Coercive Population Control in China and India. Cato Institute, Policy Analysis, No. 897. Retrieved from: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3660007