China Scraps One-Child Policy

China will finally end the restrictive one-child policy that has reduced its population by 400 million over the past 35 years.

Communist party officials announced plans to “fully adopt the policy that one couple is allowed two children,” reports The Washington Post. The change marks an effort to address China’s aging population and “promote balanced population growth, stick to the basic state policy of family planning, and enhance population growth strategy.”

Demographic factors, especially in recent years, pressured China to adapt its controversial policy, which has resulted in a gender imbalance due to widespread sex-selective abortions. (If a couple is only allowed one child, many have preferred that the child be male.)

But the government's move does not address the root problem, says Reggie Littlejohn, the president of Women's Rights Without Frontiers, whose group has fought against China's one-child policy for years.

"Instituting a two-child policy will not end forced abortion, gendercide or family planning regulations in China," said Littlejohn in a statement. "Couples will still have to have a birth permit for the first and the second child, or they may be subject to forced abortion...It's the fact that the government is setting a limit on children, and enforcing this limit coercively. That will not change under a two-child policy."

Source noted when China first relaxed the policy in 2013, allowing up to 11 million couples to have a second child. But earlier this year, Premier Li Keqiang admitted that the reform had failed to trigger a surge in births: only 10 percent of eligible couples took advantage of the opportunity, with just 470,000 babies born as a result.

Top leaders hinted at an eventual two-child policy, as government-sponsored research has been recommending for years. China banned late-term forced abortions under the policy in 2012, although the significance of this move was disputed among opponents of the one-child policy.

Since its implementation in 1980, the controversial policy was never uniformly enforced; most rural families could have a second child if their first was a girl. But the effects of the aging population combined with the gender disparity remain stark: China now numbers 116 boys to 100 girls (37 million more men than women total), and a generational imbalance of a rapidly aging workforce and too few workers supporting retirees.

Christian groups have long advocated for ending the one-child policy.