The Chinese Communist Party’s decision to allow citizens to have up to three children is a desperate attempt to fix the damage done by population control programs that killed hundreds of millions of children, experts told Breitbart News this week.
The “one-child policy,” which allowed each couple only one legal child, resulted in the “prevention” of 400 million births, according to the Chinese regime. A significant majority of these children were girls, as families often preferred — if given permission for only one heir — their child to be a son. The 2020 Chinese government census found that China is home to nearly 35 million more men than women, and the country is suffering a dire shortage of women of child-bearing age.
Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), who has spent almost four decades working in Congress to hold the Chinese Communist Party accountable for what he calls the worst assault on women in history, told Breitbart News in an interview on Wednesday that experts have predicted for years this would happen.
“They are white-knuckled scared,” Smith said, referring to the Chinese government. “They are frightened of what demographers have been predicting for years.”
“More than ten years ago, the Chinese demographers were saying that by 2020 there would be approximately 40 million men who would not be able to find a wife because [female unborn babies] have been exterminated automatically as part of the one-child policy coupled with sex-selection abortion,” Smith said. “So they simply wouldn’t be there.”
“And now they see the double jeopardy that they’re facing with the additional jeopardy of not having enough workers because they have an increasingly graying population,” Smith said. “And who’s going to support them in their older age? So it shows you what happens when a communist party or any dictatorial regime tries to impact the demography the way China has.”
“There’s no precedent for the sweeping nature of the one-child per couple policy,” Smith said.
Smith predicted forced abortions would continue in China, even with a birth rate collapse. The one-child policy only applies to members of China’s Han majority population and, indeed, extensive evidence indicates that China forces abortion, infanticide, and sterilization on vast numbers of women of the ethnic Uyghur minority population, limiting the nation’s ability to reproduce.
Reggie Littlejohn, founder and president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, told Breitbart News that the announcement of a three-child policy is “too little too late” for China’s population crisis and “nothing to celebrate.”
“China’s move from a two-child policy to a three-child policy is nothing to celebrate,” Littlejohn said in a statement provided to Breitbart News. “China should abolish all coercive population control.”
“A three-child policy keeps the ‘womb police’ employed,” Littlejohn said. “They will still be tracking women’s fertility and birth, and punishing those who find themselves ‘illegally pregnant.’”
“According to a 2020 Radio Free Asia report, ‘an average of 8 million ‘extra’ pregnancies are aborted in China each year,’ Littlejohn said. “Since the new three-child policy applies to only couples, single women will still be forcibly aborted, as will fourth children.”
“These gross violations of women’s rights and human rights must be stopped, effective immediately,” Littlejohn said.
Littlejohn said all of China’s population control policies have failed.
“China did not experience the baby boom it had expected when it moved to the two-child policy in 2016,” Littlejohn said. “Indeed, its birth rate has plummeted to the lowest in decades. It is facing a demographic crisis because of its rapidly aging population. The move to a three-child policy is too little, too late to avert this impending disaster.”
“The CCP [Chinese Communist Party] is a brutal, totalitarian regime, responsible for multifarious human rights abuses,” Littlejohn said. “Coercive population control, however, is unique in that it touches each individual and community.”
“The CCP maintains its terrifying grip on power by extending its arm from Beijing and inserting its hand into every womb to declare life or death over the beating heart inside,” Littlejohn said.
Dictator Xi Jinping first eased the one-child policy in 2016 to allow two children, but a lack of interest in having children on the part of young couples and a shortage of women of child-bearing age resulted in declining birth rates even after the change.
According to the South China Morning Post, a poll taken in March found 67 percent of millennials said the “inability to find domestic help” was the top reason they would not have a second child making a surge in births from the new three-child policy unlikely.
Follow Penny Starr on Twitter or send news tips to pstarr@breitbart.com.