The Quake and the One Child Policy

Interesting report on how family planning officials in Chengdu are amending rules to allow families affected by the Sichuan earthquake to register illegal children and apply to have additional children:

The Chengdu Population and Family Planning Committee, located in Sichuan’s capital, said that families affected by the disaster can obtain a certificate to have another child, the Associated Press reports.

The Chinese government normally enforces its one-child policy by fining couples who have more than one child. However, the committee’s announcement said that if a child born illegally was killed in the earthquake, parents will no longer have to pay
fines, though previously paid fines will not be refunded. If a couple’s legally born child was killed but its illegally born sibling survived, that sibling can be registered as the legal child, the authorities explained.

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[Steven]Mosher, [China expert] who has followed the one-child policy since its inception and described it in his most recent book “Population Control”, went on to comment that "The natural human reaction to losing a child is to have a make-up child as quickly as possible. But this will not be possible for most of the couples who have lost children to the quake, regardless of what the government policy is. Most women of childbearing age have been sterilized, or their spouses have been sterilized. Unless the government begins offering free tubal ligation and vasectomy reversals to these poor people, there will be no more children."