Last month, China announced that it would allow couples to have up to three children, an increase from the two children allowed per couple previously. Prior to 2016, China had a one-child policy, which was instituted in 1980 and enforced by the National Health and Family Planning Commission. It legally restricted most couples to only one birth, with some notable exceptions. For example, rural families were allowed to have two children if the first was a girl, and urban families were allowed to have a second child if the parents were both single children.
As many nations became concerned with population growth in the 1970s, China initially reacted by initiating a “Late, Long, and Few” birth control campaign, which cut its fertility rate by half from 1970 to 1976. However, the fertility rate eventually leveled off after this dramatic decrease. With a population still battling food shortages, Deng Xiaoping, who was under pressure to establish legitimacy having recently inherited the leadership of China from Mao Zedong, formalized and introduced the one-child policy in order to control the quickly growing population of China, which was almost 1 billion at the time. The problem with China’s draconian population control policy is that it attacks the human person’s intrinsic dignity based on his identity as a creature made in the image and likeness of God. This approach also fails to alleviate impoverished conditions. As Acton Senior Research Fellow Michael Mattheson Miller points out, such thinking is based on the fallacy that the economy is a zero-sum game, in which more people means less wealth to go around. But wealth can grow – and more humans can equal more wealth creation and more poverty alleviation. There’s a reason God commanded Christians to “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28).
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