(Washington Insider Magazine) – China’s cabinet, the State Council, has released new guidelines with the aim of improving fertility and reproductive health. It is part of an updated “Outline for Women’s Development”.
There has been a large shift in many policy areas for China’s government in recent months including inequality, climate change and financing of growth. Whilst all are important matters as geopolitical tensions rise and China moves towards its self-declared second stage of development, there is one issue that looms larger than the rest.
China’s one-child policy was one of the most extreme in human history. Whilst attempts to control women’s reproductive rights are far from new, the scale with which the problem of overpopulation was tackled was unprecedented.
China’s government claims the policy prevented 400 million births, which would’ve sounded even more astronomical when it was introduced in 1980 and China’s population was still under 1 billion. The famines that have plagued China for centuries, including in the beginning years of the PRC left a lasting scar in many Chinese families, contributing greatly to the wide support of such an extreme policy. Forced sterilisations and abortions were reported in the most severe cases.
Forty years later, China finds itself struggling to reverse the demographic effects of such policies. It is expected that the population will start declining in the next decade. Wealthy countries like Japan are struggling to with this relatively new problem, but supporting such an old population will be especially difficult in a developing country like China.
It is not only the one-child policy that China has to reverse now. The country’s development has brought new opportunities to women outside the family, meaning many people don’t desire a large family. The extremely competitive nature of education in much of East Asia also makes child-rearing particularly stressful and expensive.
Feminists the world over are watching closely in hopes that demographic-aimed policies don’t encroach on reproductive rights. The one-child policy has slowly been relaxed and of this year is now a three-child policy. Maternity leave has been made more generous, subsidies have been introduced for women who have two children, and childcare has been improved.
Whilst it is still unclear exactly how the Outline for Women’s Development will be finalised, some are wary that talk about reproductive health could be preparing people for strict abortion laws that require medical reasons to have a procedure.
However, feminists in support of China’s government will warn against throwing pre-emptive accusations, citing the huge improvements in life for women in China in recent decades.