A GOVERNMENT GETS OUT OF THE REPRODUCTION BUSINESS

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-34665539

The Chinese have learned the hard way that government-run family planning is a bad idea.  Though begun as a way to halt their runaway population numbers, the rule of unintended consequences has bitten them in the butt.  Over decades of their one-child rule, government abuses of this power have cowed the population, while demographic shifts have created a growing aging population while the labor force is diminishing, and a skewed ratio of males to females.

There are horrific tales of government inspectors in every community ensuring in violent ways, including forced late-term abortions, “a river of blood rather than another birth.”  The under-the-table payment to government officials to escape such horror is the privilege of the wealthier Chinese and not available to those without the funds.

It has been widely known for a long time the consequences of a one child choice in a culture that prefers boys.  Despite a half-hearted effort to make it illegal to do so, parents have used ultrasounds to identify and abort female fetuses by the millions, and there has been a steady stream of accounts of female infanticide, and daughters abandoned (sometimes on roadsides) in the hope of out-of-country adoptions.  Boy babies have suffered too, if they were a second or third pregnancy. The mental illness and suicide rate among young women of childbearing age has risen over the time of this wrong-headed policy.

For more than a generation, the number of boys to girls has grown; in 2012 there were 40 million more men than women, making it increasingly difficult for marriageable young men to find a spouse.  The only upside of this war on girls: Chinese women have had more and better choices about whom to date and marry.

There is a principle here to ponder about being pro-life:  When governments become involved through force in these most private and personal decisions, they steal fundamental freedoms.   If a government can prevent you from using birth control, or says you can’t have an abortion, a government can tell you you must use birth control, or have an abortion.  If population control for public policy reasons is seen as in a nation’s interest, the method must be through persuasion of minds and hearts, not force.  China’s overpopulation problem remains; they are realizing now that to solve it, better, more humane, ways must be embraced.