Pros And Cons Of China's One Child Policy

Will a Future With Population Control Make Us or Break Us?

In 1979, an announcement was spread throughout China: families were now permitted to have only one child each. At first, the policy did all of the things it should have, but over time, the results became questionable at best. Families that gave birth to an undesirable child abandoned and gave away their children, the population triangle was flipped upside down, and many began to question the power of the government to rob such a basic human right. The policy that was enforced in China all those years ago was something called population control. The idea of population control was initially introduced as a way to balance the boy-to-girl ratio and lessen the country and world’s population.

In the article “12 Pros and Cons of China’s One Child Policy” by Louise Gaille, the author explains the reasons why China’s policy is good and why it’s bad. She says, “Planning the size of one’s family is believed to be a basic human right.” As human beings, we are empowered to be able to have as many children as we like, as well as the rights we reserve for freedom of expression, work, education, and more. Through the enforcement of population control, the basic rights of human beings are robbed and violated. Therefore, population control isn’t necessary or legal, for that matter, because it’s a violation of an underlying human right. To conclude, population control should not be put into action because it takes away basic rights that we as human beings are entitled

Later in Gaille’s article, she further explains that the parents’ right to choose is violated through the execution of population control. Using some evidence of her own, she says, “In a 1968 proclamation from the International Conference on Human Rights, it was decided that [the] number… of children in a family is a basic right of the parents.” This quote explains that population control is in direct contrast with the right of choice that should invariably belong to the parents of whoever is in their family. And so, a restriction on the number of children a family can have should not be warranted because it robs parents of this choice that should always be theirs. To summarize, population control shouldn’t be enforced because parents deserve the opportunity to choose how their family is