January 2016 – At a meeting on economic considerations for the next five years, China’s Communist Party central committee raised the threshold on the number of children its citizens are permitted to have. It is now legal for them to have two children, provided birth permits are obtained. The decision was motivated by the forecast of an aging population and dwindling workforce. By 2030 China will lose 67 million workers, and gain 100 million elderly in a population that will then be the oldest on earth.
Even with the official end of the one-child policy – which has led to the abortion of 336 million babies since it was enacted in 1971 – government-enforced family planning remains in effect.
“The core of the policy is that they’re telling people how many kids they can have, then enforcing that limit coercively with forced abortion, forced sterilization, and forced contraception,” said human rights activist Reggie Littlejohn of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers.
