It is a long time since China is no longer the country of unlimited population growth, of the “one-child policy” which, since the end of the 1970s, has implemented the rigid birth planning program aimed at limiting the overabundance of new born. In contrast, the latest census carried out by the Beijing government sounded a wake-up call in the opposite direction: From 2011 to 2020, the Chinese population grew at a rate as low as it hasn’t seen since the 1950s. The fertility rate decreased from 1.6 live births per woman in 2016 to 1.3 in 2020.
To put a stop to this demographic slowdown, Beijing has announced that it will reduce the number of abortions carried out “for non-medical reasons”. The decision was released today, and is part of a package of new measures aimed at addressing ‘women’s reproductive health‘.
It is not the first time, however, that the government intervenes in the field of abortion to combat the phenomenon of aging of the population. Measures against selective abortions – decided on the basis of the sex of the unborn child – had already been adopted years ago, and in 2018 the health authority had intervened declaring that abortion against “unwanted pregnancies was harmful to women and risked causing infertility “. The widespread use of the practice in past years has consolidated it as part of government support to control the birth rate, like contraceptives and sterilization campaigns. According to state statistics, between 1971 – the year of introduction of the first pro-abortion laws – to 2013, there were over 330 million terminations of pregnancy operated by Chinese doctors.
So Beijing today fears what it greatly facilitated in the baby boom years. And judging by the data, it has a good reason: the World Population Prospects 2019, published by the United Nations, showed that today’s China is a country that is aging quickly, whose median age is 38 years compared to 19 years’ 70. Finally, the prospects worry the pension system: according to projections, by 2050 about one third of the country’s population will be over 60 years old. This means that the burden of these inactive people – many of whom are parents of only children – will rest on the shoulders of the latter.