Relatives Detained and Culprits Sterilized for Violating One-Child Policy
I find it pleasing that two news pieces regarding population control efforts have caught my eye one after the other during the past few days, though I’m sure nearly all human rights activists are appalled by both of them. This time, it’s about the authorities from Puning county, Guangdong Province, China, who are so determined to sterilize those who have violated the one-child policy that they are rounding up the relatives of those who refuse, in order to pressure them into it. And it seems to be a far more effective tactic than applying the penalties according to the law.
Sure, punishing the relatives of the culprits is completely unfair, though the fact that they’re made to listen to lectures on the rules limiting the size of families while in detention is a nice twist. The right thing to do would have obviously been to go after the actual culprits who refused to come voluntarily like after common criminals, round them up, sterilize them and then make them listen to those lectures. Admittedly, picking up whatever relatives the authorities could get their hands on and then waiting for the culprits to give themselves up in exchange for their relatives’ freedom makes it much easier for the officials, but it’s really not right.
China’s one-child policy is wrong in many ways, starting with the fact that in its most basic form it allows every couple, from brilliant scientists or athletes to wretches with the IQ of a newt and enough genetically transmissible diseases for an entire village, to have the same number of descendants, then because there are so many exceptions that its effectiveness is marginal at best, but mainly because the children often suffer for their parents’ crime of having had them. Yet it is an attempt to reduce the number of births and ultimately also the population, and that fact in itself should be appreciated.
That said, the punishment for having more than the legal number of children should obviously be sterilization, by force if necessary, while the resulting illegal children, if they have already been born or the pregnancy was only discovered in the final trimester, which is likely too late for abortion to be the proper solution, should be treated just like legal ones, because it’s most definitely not their fault that they were born. Actually, to send a clear enough message, the punishment for giving birth to an illegal child should involve neutering in such a way as to make sexual activity impossible from that moment forward, and it should obviously apply to both parents unless they broke up well before the date of the birth and the father can prove that he was unaware of the pregnancy. Entering the final trimester of pregnancy or even giving birth while being unaware that you are pregnant, or unaware that the woman you live with or at least see frequently is pregnant, is not an acceptable excuse.
I’ll say that making these changes to the punishments listed in the policy would be a huge improvement, both greatly increasing its effectiveness and ensuring that only the culprits are punished, leaving their relatives and especially their illegal children, if they ended up being born, alone. Fairness and efficiency in the same package is not something that you often see…
Of course, that would still leave the problem of the policy itself. In order to solve that, exceptions would need to stop being made for any reason other than the actual genetic qualities that the parents are likely to pass on to any potential children. Sure, saying that any couple can have one child and truly worthy ones, from a strictly genetic point of view, can also have a second one is very far from my idea, but it would at least be a huge improvement over the current situation.
In fact, if all countries would adopt such a policy, allowing only one child for most couples and two for the few who would actually be worthy of having any, it could be a reasonable first step in the right direction. In itself, such a measure would be far from sufficient, something far more drastic certainly being needed no later than 2030, and preferably even before 2020, but I guess there may still be a little bit of time to take it a little slower. There will most definitely be a price to pay for taking it slower, but it will be much smaller than the one we’ll be paying for doing nothing at all, and such a measure may even have the tiniest bit of a chance to be adopted in some places, unlike the plan I have in mind…
Still, seeing as at the start of the year I was saying that overpopulation is unlikely to be an issue the world will care any more about this year than in the previous ones, it’s good to see that reducing the number of births and ultimately the population is an issue for at least a few countries and that news about this make it out now and then, despite the tone of most of those articles. The problem, of course, being that the countries in question are among those that are otherwise very bad examples to follow, considering their authoritarian governments. Yet it appears that such regimes are required in order to even attempt to enact a population control policy, as all but an extremely small number of people think only with their gonads when it comes to the issue of reproduction.
On the other hand, the very bad news is that there are certain other countries, such as Russia, Ukraine or Japan, who strongly push their citizens to have more children, thinking of nothing but their own economic growth. And most developed countries also tend to encourage their citizens to have children, though without being so adamant about it, for the exact same reason. So I need to rephrase the above statement and say that, when it comes to the issue of reproduction, all but very few common people think with nothing but their gonads and all but very few of those who are in positions of authority think with nothing but their pockets.
