It sounds like the best news we could possibly hear: Media reports claim that China is going to phase out its one-child policy and allow parents to have two children. Within eight years, the government will allow parents to have as many children as they want.
There's just one problem: It's not true. According to Reggie Littlejohn of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, China's communist government plans to keep tight control over how many children a family may have.
So why are we hearing that China will abandon its brutal one-child policy? Well, a think tank affiliated with the Chinese government, the China Development Research Foundation, has recommended that China do so. The think tank cited the horrific results of the one-child policy, among them “the coming demographic disaster caused by low birth rates combined with an aging population, as well as the severe gender imbalance caused by son preference.”
There's also the fact that China has been embarrassed in the past year by stories that show just how far the government will go to brutally enforce the one-child policy: kidnapping women, dragging them into clinics, strapping them down, and aborting babies even in the ninth month of development.
But there’s reason to doubt that China's government will ever accept the think tank’s recommendations: China's National Population and Family Planning Commission has announced that it believes in the one-child policy, celebrating it for “preventing” the birth of 400 million children!
According to Littlejohn, even if China did allow couples to have two children, forced abortion would continue. The problem with the one-child policy is not the number of children “allowed,” but the fact that the government “is telling women how many children they can have and then enforcing that limit through forced abortion, forced sterilization, and infanticide,” she says.
Second, allowing couples to have two children will not stop gendercide — that is, the abortion of female children. Littlejohn points to evidence that, in provinces where two children are already allowed, if parents already have a girl, they are far more likely to abort a second female child. Littlejohn notes that there are now “an estimated 37 million Chinese men who will never marry because their future wives were terminated before they were born.” And that, she adds, is a “driving force behind trafficking in women and sexual slavery” in China and neighboring countries.
Here we have dramatic evidence that worldview matters. Christianity teaches that husbands and wives properly, and prayerfully, along with God Himself, are the only ones who should decide how many children to have. But China's communist leaders believe that the government should decide these issues — with horrific and deadly results.
The recommendations by the China Development Research Foundation have sent the world's media into a tizzy. Many news outlets have misrepresented the recommendations, perhaps not realizing the truth: that China's leaders have no intention of giving up the one-child policy, the cause of “more violence towards women and girls than any other official policy on earth ... in the history of the world,” as Littlejohn puts it.
To learn the truth, and how you can help save the lives of China's innocent baby girls, please visit us at BreakPoint.org. We’ll link you to the website for Women's Rights Without Frontiers.
In a season in which we celebrate the birth of a holy Baby, we must not abandon efforts to save the lives of innocent children, precious to God.
Eric Metaxas is a co-host of BreakPoint Radio and a best-selling author whose biographies, children's books, and popular apologetics have been translated into more than a dozen languages.
BreakPoint commentary airs each weekday on more than one thousand outlets with an estimated listening audience of one million people. BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on today's news and trends via radio, interactive media, and print.
Publication date: January 15, 2013
