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Despite this raising other important concerns such as gender inequality in China, the growing problem of infanticide did lead to change: the government relaxed the one-child policy so that a couple could have a second child, but only if their first child was a girl. On the other hand, the government has also faced heavy criticism of its methods of trying to enforce the one-child policy in the past. In rural areas, it was very difficult for the government to enforce the policy, and so only really applied in urban areas of the country.
In extreme cases, the government in China would force pregnant women who already had one child to have an abortion. However, they were also forced to
introduce laws in 2005 outlawing sex-selective abortions, which were increasingly common choices being made by couples who knew the sex of their baby to be
female before birth.
Whilst true statistics are difficult to obtain from China, it is thought that there are now 60 million more men than women in China. This gender imbalance is almost certainly an indirect result of the one-child policy. Another theory suggests that there are unofficially millions of more women in China who were never registered with local authorities by their parents through fear of being fined or losing their child.
Next Question
The necessity of having children in some parts of China is something many in the West have trouble understanding. After all, increasing numbers of adults in the West now choose not to have children purely for environmental reasons.
Research by statisticians at Oregon State University in America fund that because of the average American's huge carbon footprint, having a child in America
increased a person's long-term carbon output by up to 20 times. To put this into greater context, the long-term pollution output of a child born in the U.S. can be
up to 160 times higher than that of a child born in Bangladesh.
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One of the reasons in China for changing the one-child policy to a two-child policy in 2015 was that the original policy was almost redundant anyway. The original legislation was only aimed at a single generation. Under the ruling, any couple in China who were both sole children to their respective parents were allowed to have two children. Therefore the two-child policy was already in effect for most couples already by 2015.
China has a rapidly developing economy, and with such development comes a higher average carbon output per person. This leads some authorities to worry that the already-strained environment in China will suffer even more in decades to come. Having said that, as China continues to experience such rapid economic
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