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China Changes “One Child” Policy, but Liberal Malthusian Professor Begs to Differ

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The Chinese tyranny has amended its one-child policy to “allow” couples to have two children. Why? Not out of the milk of human kindness. China is an aging society and many elderly will not have families to care for them. Moreover, there are tens of millions more males than females, leaving many men without the prospect of marriage and thus resulting in social discord.

Centralized control almost always creates more problems than it solves. The point is lost, though, on Bowdoin College philosophy professor Sarah Conly. She wants a worldwide one-child policy. In fact, she claims in the Boston Globe that no one has a “right” to have more than one child:

Even having two children — the replacement value for the population — as the new Chinese policy allows is likely to be too many children. Due to what specialists call “demographic momentum,” the population will continue to grow for quite some time even if we all cut back now to two children.

By the time the birthrate stabilizes, the global population will be at an unsustainable level. So, we don’t have a right to have so many children. We can live happy, fulfilled lives with just one child, and one child per couple will keep the human race going until we get to that point when we do reach a sustainable population and can go back to allowing ourselves to reproduce at replacement value — two children per two parents.

But here’s the problem: China’s policy led to forced abortions, sex-selection abortion, and the rampant female infanticide that destroyed the country’s demographics — none of which, incidentally, prevented the world’s most politically correct corporations from merrily doing business in the country. One hopes the change will reduce the level of human rights abuses, but less tyranny is still tyranny.

Conly mildly acknowledges that such barbarities are “unacceptable.” That’s big of her.

Meanwhile in the U.S., Europe, and Japan, couples are already having far fewer children — in a few countries, below replacement numbers. Sure there are large families in the West. But they are the exception. Indeed, one reason some say that massive waves of immigration are required in Europe is to bring young workers in to replace and support aging populations.

In contrast, large families are common in the developing world. People in those places want children, for love, for culture, for tradition. And they believe they need many children to help support the family and care for parents in places where there are few social services.

Typically of liberal Malthusians, after painting a dire picture of apocalyptic environmental collapse, Professor Conly thinks that we can achieve her desired end by enacting unthreatening policies:

We may well be able to reduce the fertility rate without using sanctions at all, and that would, of course, be best…

First, we can educate people about the need to have fewer children…

Second, we can make it easy to control how many children we have. We could make contraception free and readily available.

Or, we can go farther, and reward those who have fewer children, say with tax breaks…

Lastly, if we ever did discover that we needed sanctions to get people to refrain from having an unsustainable number of children, they wouldn’t be physical in nature. Fines may be the best way to go, and again, there is reason to think suitable fines, fixed on a sliding scale relative to income, can be effective…

That is utter nonsense. Even the abuses in China, far worse than “unacceptable,” did not reduce the number of people in that country. They just slowed the rate of population growth. To really reduce the world’s population would require unremitting tyranny and population cleansings.

I fear that liberal population controllers would willingly embrace the most brutal forms of coercion, as we saw last century in the eugenics movement, which was a progressive cause. After all, there’s a planet to save! They just won’t say it.

Image credit: By ?? (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Wesley J. Smith

Chair and Senior Fellow, Center on Human Exceptionalism
Wesley J. Smith is Chair and Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism. Wesley is a contributor to National Review and is the author of 14 books, in recent years focusing on human dignity, liberty, and equality. Wesley has been recognized as one of America’s premier public intellectuals on bioethics by National Journal and has been honored by the Human Life Foundation as a “Great Defender of Life” for his work against suicide and euthanasia. Wesley’s most recent book is Culture of Death: The Age of “Do Harm” Medicine, a warning about the dangers to patients of the modern bioethics movement.

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