Beijing control over family size is attack on women
https://themilitant.com/2021/06/26/beijing-control-over-family-size-is-attack-on-women/
BY SETH GALINSKY
Vol. 85/No. 26
July 5, 2021
Worried that its population is aging and there won’t be enough young
workers to exploit to maximize state profits, the Chinese government
announced last month that it was raising the limit on the number of
children a family is allowed to three and began a propaganda campaign to
encourage more childbirth. Now Beijing officials are considering
dropping all restrictions on larger families.
The Chinese rulers fear that having a shrinking and aging population is
a barrier to challenging Washington for greater economic and political
influence.
Government interference in the personal decisions of when, if and how
many children a woman has is reactionary. These decisions should be in
her hands alone in conjunction with her family. To make that possible it
is necessary to fight for access to family planning, including aid in
conceiving a child if needed and the right to safe and secure abortion.
At the beginning of the 1970s the Maoist regime in Beijing pressured
women to have fewer children. In 1979 government bureaucrats imposed a
general cap of one child per woman. Those who violated the law had to
pay huge fines or were forced to have abortions.
At the end of 2015, with Chinese women averaging only 1.05 children, the
second lowest in the world, Beijing raised the cap to two. That did
little to increase the birthrate. In China, just like in the U.S., the
U.K., France and other countries, birthrates have been declining for years.
The decline in workers’ real wages, the rise in the cost of living and
lack of child care, a result of the bosses foisting the capitalist
crisis on the backs of working people, are also key to the decline in
family formation worldwide. Even in the United States, the strongest
imperialist power, many young workers today can’t earn enough to live on
their own, so they put off having children.
An affordable family is even harder to establish in China with low
wages, sky-high rents and mortgages, and meager pensions. Child care as
well as nursing homes and other facilities for seniors are further out
of reach for working people there than in the U.S. And it’s women who
face the biggest burden, with the responsibility for children and the
elderly falling almost entirely on the family.
When Xinhua News in China published the results of a poll that asked
22,000 people, “Are you ready for the three-child policy?” Twenty
thousand chose, “I won’t consider it at all.” The poll was quickly
deleted from the agency’s website.
Working-age couples in China often have to take care of “two sets of
parents who don’t have much income for savings or pension plans if any,
plus any kids they already have,” reports Al Jazeera.
While the rulers in Beijing are trying to get women from the majority
Han population to have more babies, they subject women among the mostly
Muslim Uighur people in the Northwest to strict birth control policies.
Long discriminated against and persecuted by Beijing, Uighurs often face
forced sterilization and abortions, reports The Associated Press.
This goes hand in hand with Beijing’s systematic detention of hundreds
of thousands of Uighurs in forced labor camps.
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--
Irvin D. Yalom “Truth," Nietzsche continued, "is arrived at through
disbelief and skepticism, not through a childlike wishing something were
so! Your patient's wish to be in God's hands is not truth. It is simply
a child's wish—and nothing more! It is a wish not to die, a wish for the
eveastingly bloated nipple we have labeled 'God'! Evolutionary theory
scientifically demonstrates God's redundancy—though Darwin himself had
not the courage to follow his evidence to its true conclusion. Surely,
you must realize that we created God, and that all of us together now
have killed him.” ― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept