Si Rong
One-Child Policy is a policy imposed of the residents of China, whereby the residents are allowed to only have one child per family and fines will be imposed if a family has two or more children.
One of the more obvious advantages of this policy is that it will effectively reduce the large population in China and therefore reduce the growing poverty. As China is a huge country trying to support and feed its residents, a smaller population will ensure that a large amount of its people will be fed, and it will be easier to do so.
On the other hand, it may be expensive for pregnant couples to apply for abortion in order to ensure that the number of children in the family does not exceed one. Also, many families would prefer sons due to religious or personal reasons, for example, to carry on the families' legacy, therefore they would chose to abort their baby if it was a girl. This will result in an imbalance between the amount of female and male children. All these however, merely scratch the surface of the situation. The issue with One-Child Policy is that it challenges to moral values of people. Some residents may argue that abortion is a cruel and heartless act as it is essentially murder due to the fact that the embryo is a living thing. Therefore, to abort one's baby was equal to killing a living child. However, the residents are compelled to abort their child due to the fact that having two or more children in China is not allowed. Couples are encouraged to have only one children. Does that mean that China is essentially encouraging murder?
Tzeh Yuan
Obviously there are many problems. Such as an aging population due to the to fact that there are less children. Also the population size will decrease. This may result in a country where the majority of the citizens are old people. Besides it may cause the children to be lonely as most of the adults in china is working and the children will not have any siblings and thus feel lonely.
Hai Shu
Con: Forces abortions and human rights violation:
One child policy has been challenged both in practice and in principle for violation human rights to identify the size of one’s family. The proclamation of the International Conference on Human Rights in the year 1968 revealed that parents have the right to determine responsibly and freely the spacing and the number of children. In the execution of one child policy, a lot of local governments demand abortions once pregnancy violates some local regulations.
Pros: Poverty Eradication in China:
In the poor areas in the country, too many births and cultural and economic backwardness mostly interact as cause and effects. Chine government has started to take steps in providing support to develop those poor areas in order to alleviate poverty. The government is doing so by family planning, raising quality of life of the population in such areas and holding the growth of population under control.
Reduce number of Population:
The number if population in China is constantly rising that is why it is important to make necessary actions to reduce its number of population. One child policy is one of the most effective ways that the government of China had realized to do this.
YiDe
Pros:
Social problems alleviation: this policy was introduced in 1978 and initially applied to first-born children from 1979. It was created by the Chinese government to alleviate social, economic, and environmental problems in China, and authorities claim that the policy has prevented more than 250 million births between 1980 and 2000, and 400 million births from about 1979 to 2011.
Lower the fertility rate: After the introduction of the one-child policy, the fertility rate in China fell from 2.63 births per woman in 1980 (already a sharp reduction from more than five births per woman in the early 1970s) to 1.61 in 2009. However, the policy itself is probably only partially responsible for the reduction in the total fertility rate.
Poverty eradication: In China’s poor areas, economic and cultural backwardness and too many births often interact as both cause and effect. The Chinese government has taken a step in giving support to the development of poor areas to alleviate poverty by promoting family planning, holding population growth under control, and raising the life quality of the population in those areas.
Public support: a 2008 survey undertaken by the Pew Research Center reported that 76% of the Chinese population supports the policy.
Cons:
Policy benefits exagerated: Another criticism is that the claimed effects of the policy on the reduction in the total fertility rate are exaggerated. Studies by Chinese demographers, funded in part by the UN Fund for Population Activities, showed that combining poverty alleviation and health care with relaxed targets for family planning was more effective at reducing fertility than vigorous enforcement of very ambitious fertility reduction targets.
Human rights violation and forced abortions: The one-child policy is challenged in principle and in practice for violating a human right to determine the size of one’s own family. According to a 1968 proclamation of the International Conference on Human Rights, “Parents have a basic human right to determine freely and responsibly the number and the spacing of their children.” In 2002, China outlawed the use of physical force to make a woman submit to an abortion or sterilization, but it is not entirely enforced. In the execution of the policy, many local governments still demand abortions if the pregnancy violates local regulations, or even force abortions on women violating the policy, such as Feng Jianmei’s case.
The “four-two-one” problem: As the first generation of law-enforced only-children came of age for becoming parents themselves, one adult child was left with having to provide support for his or her two parents and four grandparents. Called the “4-2-1 Problem”, this leaves the older generations with increased chances of dependency on retirement funds or charity in order to receive support. If personal savings, pensions, or state welfare fail, most senior citizens would be left entirely dependent upon their very small family or neighbours for assistance.
Possible social problems for a generation of only children: Some parents may over-indulge their only child. The media referred to the indulged children in one-child families as “little emperors”. Since the 1990s, some people have worried that this will result in a higher tendency toward poor social communication and cooperation skills among the new generation, as they have no siblings at home. No social studies have investigated the ratio of these over-indulged children and to what extent they are indulged. With the first generation of children born under the policy reaching adulthood, such worries were reduced.
Unequal enforcement: Government officials and especially wealthy individuals have often been able to violate the policy in spite of fines. For example, between 2000 and 2005, as many as 1,968 officials in central China’s Hunan province were found to be violating the policy, according to the provincial family planning commission; also exposed by the commission were 21 national and local lawmakers, 24 political advisors, 112 entrepreneurs and 6 senior intellectuals. Some of the offending officials did not face penalties, although the government did respond by raising fines and calling on local officials to “expose the celebrities and high-income people who violate the family planning policy and have more than one child.”
Birth tourism: A way to escape the strict rules of the one-child policy is for Chinese women to give birth to their second child overseas. A favourite destination was Hong Kong. Hong Kong is exempt from the one-child policy and the Hong Kong passport, which is different from a China mainland passport, provides additional advantages. Recently though, the Hong Kong government has drastically reduced the quota of births set for non-local women in public hospitals. As a result fees for delivering babies there have surged.
Jing Qing
China has it's reasons for imposing the one-child policy on its people.
For one, lesser resources are required to be able to support the population. This will help the Chinese economically, as with lesser children to support, there would be lesser money spent.
The one-child policy also helps to slow down the increasing world population. Resources in the world are decreasing at an alarming rate due to the increase in world population, and the one-child policy will help to prevent that.
However, the one-child policy is also a bad thing.
Many women are being brutally forced to go through abortions against their will. There are families which do not agree with abortion, especially Christians, and the government should not be forcing them to do something against their beliefs.
Furthermore, the moment a baby is being developed in a woman's womb, it is a human's life. To take away that life is to commit a murder.
Because of the preference for boys instead of girls, many girls are being aborted or killed shortly after birth. This results in many more males than females. As the males are unable to find any more women, sexual assault and violence is on the increase.
In my opinion, the one-child policy should be abolished. It has caused so much murder, violence and sexual abuse. Why should the people of China suffer such injustice?
