On October 29, 2015, China officially changed their one child policy to allow for two instead. This is great news, right? Children will have siblings! There will be more young people! But the fact still remains that China is telling women what they can do with their bodies.
Many people are arguing that the policy was secretly feminist in that the girls lucky enough to be born into a single-child family had a distinct advantage over girls with brothers. Although the statistics definitely support this, it cannot change the fact that China is completely ignoring women’s reproductive rights. Telling a woman when she can and cannot have children is an absolute violation of her body.
Before the policy was introduced in 1979, families with both sons and daughters would focus heavily on their sons’ development and neglect the girls. Women who were born before 1980 made up about 30% of the higher education population. For those born in 1980-1982, the statistic went up to 41%, and continued to rise to almost 50% for females born between 1990 and 1992.
Women who were only children were not only more likely to pursue a higher education, but they were also more politically active. Out of 24, 20 applied for Chinese Communist Party membership. 13 out of 24 women with siblings applied, while only 5 of 18 siblingless men did.
Despite all this, one estimate puts the number of forced abortions at 336 million between 1971 (8 years before the policy became a law) and 2015. As of 2014, this is more than the entire U.S. population. The pie chart shows a more recent annual number of forced abortions in five different countries, with China making up 89.2% of the chart.
Even with the change in policy, there is still a strict limitation on how many children a woman can have. As long as someone is telling women what they can and cannot do with their bodies, there can be no big shift in the way that this society treats women. The change in policy is a step in the right direction, but more than just one step is needed.