SPUC has slammed China’s policy shift that will “allow” married couples to have up to three children. Antonia Tully, SPUC’s Director of Campaigns, said: “The Chinese state has no right to ‘allow’ couples to have three children any more than it had the right to tell couples in 1979 that they could have only one child. No state should dictate how many children a couple should have.”

China’s President Xi Jinping approved the policy shift at a meeting of top Communist Party officials.

China’s one-child policy, which was imposed in 1979 to halt the rising birth rate, was scrapped in 2016 and replaced with a two-child limit.

Now, the country’s recent policy shift comes after census data showed a dramatic decline in population growth. 12 million births were recorded in China in 2020, compared to 18 million births just four years previously in 2016.

The Chinese Communist Party confirmed that “China will introduce major policies and measures to actively deal with the ageing population”.

The greatest bioethical atrocity on the globe

China’s population control regime has been labelled the “greatest bioethical atrocity on the globe” by Steve Mosher, President of the Population Research Institute. In a statement Mr Mosher said:

“Today, thanks to the Chinese Communist Party misbegotten population control policies, China is literally dying, filling more coffins than cradles each year.  Desperate for more workers and soldiers, the Party leader Xi is now pushing people to have more, not fewer children.

If the Chinese people do not “voluntarily” have more children, the Party will begin an escalating series of bribes, threats and punishments to ensure that they do,” Mosher said.  “Forced pregnancy is coming to China sooner than we think.”

The country’s most recent policy shift has been met with a hostile response from Chinese social media users, who have described the trauma that families have been forced to endure under the population control regime.

One person on China’s microblogging service Weibo described how his mother was forced to have an intrauterine device (IUD) fitted after giving birth to him, as he was a second child. She added that to this day she still gets infections from it. The online user accused policymakers of not “looking at the kind of distress it has caused people”.

Another social media user described how her little sister was only alive today after a doctor allowed her mother to escape from hospital after she was brought in to have a forced abortion while she was eight months pregnant.

SPUC’s Antonia Tully said: “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 16, states that men and women have the right ‘to found a family’. The Chinese state has ignored this basic human right and exercised almost unparalleled interference in the private life of its citizens.

“China has pursued a heartless policy to stop its people from having babies. Decades of cruel forced abortion and sterilisation have brutalised China’s population, robbing individuals of their basic human rights.”

“Babies have been made enemies of the Chinese state”

Mrs Tully added: “Babies have been made the enemy of the Chinese state. It is no wonder that the birth rate in China is not rising, even since the introduction of the two-child policy in 2016.

“It is the height of hypocrisy that Amnesty International is now saying that China should ‘respect people’s life choices’, when their aggressive pro-abortion policy effectively does the opposite.”