1-child policy for every single country in the world!

Firstly, it is crucial to acknowledge that population growth rates are not uniform throughout the world. While many Asian and African nations (China and India being the two famous examples) have seen enormous population growth which does indeed threaten the sustainability of many communties and pose immense challenges to resources, other parts of the world see very low and. in some cases, declining population rates. This can be due to a variety of reasons, but in more economically developed countries such as Japan and Italy, it tends to be as a result of low levels of immigration (or high emigration) and sharply declining birth rates. Perhaps one way of reducing pressure on resources would be to slacken immigration restrictions and provide incentives for people in overpopulated areas to move to nations and regions which are relatively underpopulated.

Secondly, human beings have a remarkable ability to adapt to seemingly inhospitable conditions. A survival instinct which goes above and beyond the realm of the animal kingdom has long ensured that when faced with adversity, humans have managed to get by. Clearly the challenges which overpopulation poses cannot be simply ignored or left to address themselves on their own, but we should not underestimate the solutions which could come out of a crisis. A strain on capacity, in terms of both space and resources could well provide the incentive for innovative new uses of existing space and resources.

It will start with a one child policy…and then does that mean you have to be steralised once you’ve had one child? What if the child passes away, then you have no chance of having another…so that means no steralisation…but what if birth control fails and you accidently fall pregnant again…does that mean you have to abort the child?? Which is against the core beliefs of many cultures and religions.

The one child policy might work in theory but in practice it’s much too dictatorship like; the only reason it works so well in China is because of the fact that China is able to control the movement and the actions of its inhabitants…In Western society however there would be a huge uproar as the one-child policy over here would mean an end to freedom of choice etc. Its just not going to happen.

Unplanned pregnancies happen. They happen with IUD’s and with birth control pills. Many women, including pro-choice women, strongly believe that abortion would be committing a murder. Forcing abortion on such women would be a violation of their body and their values.

Further, if you tax families that have more than one child, you’re essentially punishing the child for the sins of the parent. (i.e. you’re lowering their standard of living as punishment for being born.) That hardly seems fair.

Allow society to have unlimited access to reliable birth control. Encourage women to go to college and have careers. We’ve already seen negative population growth in countries that follow that type of policy. Japan can’t get her people to reproduce enough to sustain their economy. The same holds true for many European countries.

There’s no need to violate people’s right to their very body in order to control human population. Social factors already serve as a regulating force.

One of the long-term consequences of any sudden and enforced reduction in birth rates will be the creation of an enormous group of dependent and elderly citizens who will pose a burden to younger generations. As China is currently experiencing, a relatively small population of post-policy ‘only children’ will form the economically active group whose task is to maintain the much larger group of elderly pre-policy multiple children. As China continues to grow economically while its life expectancy rises, the pressure placed on the only children will increase and young people may find themselves supporting many more of their aged parents and grandparents. So long as population is cut in such a dramatic way, any nation which implements the policy needs to be fully prepared for the demographic and economic consequences.

China as a test case for the one child policy has shown high levels of forced abortions and female infanticide. China as in many countries around the world place higher value on boys in society (possibly due to rural families need for a son to assist in farmwork). This has led to high levels of female infanticide due to families preference to have a boy as their one child. It is common in China for new born baby girls to be left abandoned in the street. This is believed to attribute to China’s extreme population gender imbalance. This is not to say this would occur globally but would certainly affect gender balance. This ofcourse leading to problems in later life when males seek wives. The lack of women in China is thought to be the cause of many kidnappings of women from countries bordering China.

The phenomena in China of overlindulged children has been referred to by the media as ‘Little Emperor syndrome’. Social problems such as poor communication skills and sharing abilities (co-operation with others) in later life could span from being an only child.

Just to bring in another way to look at this, I will provide an example. Let us assume that there is a country with 1000 people total, with 300 of them divided equally between single females and single males within the age of childbearing but not having any children, this is 150 females and 150 males. If these 300 individuals were to become couples at the same instant and would become immediately fertile, contributing one child to the country´s population each couple, everything else remains the same, after nine months the country would have increased to a population of 1150. Straight forward. Let us further assume that births were equally divided between girls and boys, so that in the future these contemporary individuals will come to the age were their parents were at the time this example began. Seventy five women and men within childbearing age would contribute 75 new individuals to the total population of the country bringing the new total to 1225 under a similar scenario. The relative rate of growth in the country´s population from the first event to the second would show a sharp decline, but nevertheless the population went up. Over the time that went by, no one died, (after all it is just an example of my view). If we continue with the example replicating the same scenario over time with a continuing decline in birth rates and no one dying, it will reach a point where there will be no more new additions to the population because the childbearing possibilities have been exhausted with ever decreasing childbearing couples as the scenarios take place in time. My point is that in order to have a sustainable society, it must be capable to attain the capability to have a replacement rate that makes it viable and avoids it extinction. Of course there are instances where this is not happening but, in a recent trip a made to Europe, it was obvious that in the near future Europe will be facing a diluted version of what I described in my example. Many European countries have birth rates that have fallen below what makes their societies viable and are faced with the dilemma of having to support an ever increasing elderly population with fewer individuals as a result of not having had enough children. What follows I took from Wikipedia. With 82 million inhabitants in January 2010, Germany is the most populous country in the European Union. However, its fertility rate of 1.42 children per mother is one of the lowest in the world, and the federal statistics office estimates the population will shrink to between 65 and 70 million by 2060. Italy will need to raise its retirement age to 77 or admit 2.2 million immigrants annually to maintain its worker to retiree ratio. About 25% of Italian women do not have children while another 25% only have one child. The region of Liguria in northwestern Italy now has the highest ratio of elderly to youth in the world. Ten percent of Liguria’s schools closed in the first decade of the 21st century. The city of Genoa, one of Italy’s largest and the capital of Liguria, is declining faster than most European cities with a death rate of 13.7 deaths per 1,000 people, almost twice the birth rate, 7.7 births per 1,000 people, as of 2005.