They are doing the right thing. The old people will die out and over time the population will even out. I think that other countries, such as the US should move in this direction. Start with mandatory sterilization of the welfare mamas and daddies. This world has way too many people and a large proportion of them are the wrong kind of people.

But who is gonna make all the cheap crap the Americans like to buy???

To be honest I am absolutely flabbergasted that there are so many people in this discussion forum who think that this is a good policy. In a world where people are outraged when a U.S. politician even mentions limiting the right to have an abortion, I can't understand why there isn't at least equal outrage for a policy that forces millions of parents to give up their unborn child. How disgustingly invasive is that? The Chinese government is telling their citizens, "You do not need to have another baby so I'm going to reach into your womb and throw your unborn child in the trash."

I am very close to someone who was affected by this policy (this was back when the policy was first introduced). She was pregnant with a 2nd child and wanted to have the child, but decided against it because of the consequences. Both she and her husband would have lost their job and their child would have been punished for it for the rest of his/her life because the he/she wouldn't be able to receive government benefits.

In a culture where the kids are expected to care for their parents, the one child policy creates a huge strain on the younger generation not to mention the problems of the large gender discrepancy. Population should be controlled by educating people not by force.

Their culture values male children more than girls, so right now there is a very large imbalance between the sexes. They are going to have a huge social problem with too many men & not enough women in the near future.

If you are chinese and can only have one child, it must be a boy, not a girl. I know at least 4 couples that have adopted little girls from china. They are sweet children and have a good life. But what happens, when there are not enough available women for the men? At what point does their population reach zero growth? I think they have some serious problems and they wll come back to haunt them.

It seems to me that we spend too much time demonizing people rather than debating their ideas. It is OK to tell someone their ideas stink, but telling them they stink gets us nowhere. Much of the posting is focused on children as it should be. The future for my grandchildren and all of yours resides with the misbehavior of the Political Class, mostly Congress, which continues to pass expensive legislation without meaningful thought on the economic consequences. These are the folks we continue to re-elect. The projected level of debt guarantees our grandchildren a life that is much less desirable than ours. How in good conscience can we allow this to happen? How can people currently on Social Secuirty or Medicare resist future program changes that don't even effect them? Let's thank AARP for that perception. We have many problems in this country and are easily diverted from the catastophic problems by current events. The President was re-elected based on condemnation of the rich which doesn't do anything about the burdensome debt. People believed the BS. We are now focused on gun control, while we spend our grandchildren into poverty. The economic incompetency of Political Class is the problem, in my opinion. How do we get these people to set priorities and make meaningful progress? How about we deal with our problems first and condemn the rest of the world later?

The President was re-elected based on condemnation of the rich

FALSE!

This is the only humane way to reduce the population to a sustainable level. The whole world needs a one child rule. Once the population is less than 2 billion then we could go to a 2 child limit. Why can't a woman be happy having just one child? Is Barack Obama (two children) twice as happy as Bill Clinton (one child)? Have you seen all the smog currently in China? They waited too long to do this. Aren't we smarter than cats and dogs? This sure beats what Germany did in WWII. They invaded other countries and systematically killed off 6 million people to make some room for more Germans. That's why a one child rule should be universal in order to be fair. Otherwise nature will take its course and it may be 6 billion who die next time.

I lived in China for 7 years and for most in China there is the "One Child Policy" enforcement.

There are exceptions as the following:

1>If you are a resident of Shanghai, in the past years the government changed it to a Two Child Policy

only in this city because There was a much larger population of older or senior persons compared

to percentage of younger persons. This was a way to balance it out so that there would be money to take care of the seniors.

2>If you are a farmer and live in the countryside you have no limit to how many children you can have because the government needs these families to cultivate and produce food for their country.

3>If you are rich and wealthy then you can just pay a large fine and all is forgotten.

So is this "One Child Policy" really being enforced with so many Chinese crammed in high density populated cities?

Would never work in the US. Any suggestion for any type of birth regulation policy will (a) really get anti-abortion types agitated and (b) fall to racial politics, since, inevitably, minorities will, fairly, suspect that the measure's real purpose is to stop just them from reproducing.

Like it or not, the US is heading toward a half billion people sometime early in the second half of the century and possibly 750 million by 2100, and that's not even the high estimate. China's population at that point will likely be around 900 million. There will be nearly as many Americans as there will be Chinese citizens! Then our young nation could go conquer them.. and face mostly geriatric defenders.. just kidding.

If you are reading this and you are not a 1st child in your family, you should not be but rather you should have been murdered per the Genocidal Policies of the International Socialists Occupation Forces illlegally occupying the Government Offices in Beijing. This millions a year worldwide genocide makes the genocides of Mao, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin look "small" in comparision.

Well, the ruling communists do protect their own. If you have the money, you can buy more kids for yourself and your wife. All the rest must decide hard and fast, male or female, and since the males earn money guess what happens? yep you got it, females are aborted, or left to die if born. They are def gearing up for a massive social issue with lack of females. They are also in trouble when the older generation retires/dies and a smaller all male generation is left to try and support a country. Things that make you go HUMMM.. hey guess they will breed themselves into extinction. No wonder they are already looking toward some new Indian lands, drew the map and posted it to passports saying this belongs to us... What they need is a good disease lol

One child rule is certainly a sensible way to go but sterilization and birth control have to be easily available to mandate that rule. If not, we will see more of these attempted murders on innocent newborns. Tough to watch.

if they are prohibited to have anymore children, what happens to the parents if they have more children and what happen to the children? are they placed in a foster home where they are taken care of? surely the children are not murdered, that would explain why a baby was found in a sewer pipe. do the government provide birth control to the parents? the human body is unique where one couple may have one child, another couple may have more than one. how did China become the world's most populated country, next to India then? somewhere somebody having more than one child.

What a tragedy that governments of man, anywhere in the world, even think in terms of population control. Think about it: the folks who make such rules to govern the lives of the enslaved form policy "to benefit the greater good" allthewhile leaving undefined the "greater good". We humans are all of the same origin--differentiated only by cultural circumstance--regardless of what we might want to think about it. The phrase "family of man" is not merely a colloquialism.

It is those in control, not those who are controlled, who are the culprits of human misery. The earth has ample resources for all. As greed controls the allocation of those resources, humanity suffers. It is ignorance and complacency among the masses that allows such to occur.

Pffft, soon no contraception will even be necessary for mankind in the near future if Monsanto continues with its world-wide population control agenda by forcing EVERYONE to eat their GMO foods (except the very wealthy who will be able to eat organic foods and continue to procreate of course.)

The side effect of consuming GMO foods according to animal studies is third generation sterility (besides liver, kidney, intestinal, pancreatic damage, allergies, and cancer of course...) The studies are out there, Google them.

Birthrates have dropped dramatically in the US in the last decade, more people are seeking fertility clinics, yet they continue to unknowingly gobble up GMO foods and just can't figure out why they can't conceive, have miscarriages, and just don't feel good...hmmm

Look up GMO Golden Rice, it may be next on China's menu.

"One long-standing project of the US Government has been to perfect a genetically-modified variety of corn, the diet staple in Mexico and many other Latin American countries. The corn has been field tested in tests financed by the US Department of Agriculture along with a small California bio-tech company named Epicyte. Announcing his success at a 2001 press conference, the president of Epicyte, Mitch Hein, pointing to his GMO corn plants, announced, “We have a hothouse filled with corn plants that make anti-sperm antibodies.”

http://www.truthistreason.net/children-of-the-corn-gmo-sterility-and-spermicides

The one child policy should be implemented throughout the world, especially in 3rd world countries, and the affluent ones as well. This is especially important in certain religious groups that strongly advocate the "be fruitful and multiply" biblical theory. Mankind is eating this planet to the brink of extinction for all living things. That's all we do: multiply, devour food, pollute the land, sea, air, and tear down the forests to build homes.

China must do what is right for China.... they can amend the policy by not making birth control permanent if the child is born sick or disabled, or dies within a few years. The planet may come to this someday...!!!

When I think that when I was born, the world population was about 2,556,000,000...and now its about 7,000,000,000, I can't help but think that China is making the correct effort. There might be individual hardship cases, but on the whole, for the long run, it seems necessary. Nature takes care of creatures that overpopulate, but we're human, and should be able to control our species, before Mother Nature has to step in.

What I see on this comment board is a lot of people who don't appreciate their liberty because they have never gone without it. For all of you calling for the United States to implement a similar policy, I am afraid that the only thing that will show you how scary a world where even the most basic human rights are controlled by a handful of government officials you will never meet can be, is for you to experience it first hand. I personally know a lot of people who were citizens of an ex-Communist country before they came to the US to pursue opportunities for success. They love their homeland like any true patriot would, but they literally had to leave it to be able to join the pursuit of happiness that for Americans is an inalienable right.

Is the growing world population becoming a imminent issue? Yes, but unfortunately speaking, this is the very definition of Natural Selection which is key to the process of evolution.

And as for the Chinese, the reason why a large number of Chinese are calling for the one child policy to be taken down is because it has proven to be very problematic both socially (their gender balance is getting dangerously disproportionate) and economically (there aren't enough young to care for the old.)

So please, quit acting like you being "counter cultural" and calling for the drastic reduction of the earth's cancer is clever; when it is really a distinct lack of forethought and logic.

Couples are free to have as many children as they wish. If resources become scarce due to overpopulation, then market prices will reflect that fact, and parents -- on average-- will take those prices into account when deciding how many children to have. This will limit population as needed. Some individual couples will fail to do what works "on average" and may have kids they can't afford. Perhaps this is more of a risk if extremely liberal welfare policies are in place which seriously distort price signals. If that's the case, then the problem is the welfare policies -- the problem isn't freedom. Similarly market forces don't work well in a place like Communist China, which has a command economy. So their problem isn't a lack of regulation, it's a lack of freedom.