China's One-Child Policy Essay

Ignored and Abused, forgotten and unwanted, women and children lack freedom both in the household and in society. The One-Child Policy heightened the injustice they face and continued to restrict women’s reproductive rights. “In the nineteen-eighties, female factory workers were forced to show their stained menstrual napkins to prove they weren’t pregnant” (Demick). Although China has gone along way to make revisions to the One-Child Policy, there needs to be an end to sex-selective abortions in rural areas through propaganda that promotes the value of females.
Currently, China’s government is ruled by the Communist Party, which mainly consists of obedient elites. The group decided to pass a detrimental policy after Mao’s Great Leap Forward, …show more content…
They constantly ignore the pleas from women, like Feng, who have been forced to abort their child at seven to eight months. Feng described that she was dragged to the hospital, where she was bagged over the head and her consent was forged by the official who pressed her fingerprint on a legal document. After she “agreed” to the abortion, a needle was instantly injected into her uterus, poisoning her seven month infant -- directly after the procedure, her child was stillborn (Wong). The trauma these women face did not prompt the country to revise the law, but the issue of a decreasing workforce and unbalanced ratio of males to females did. Following the new “Two-Child Policy,” the government stated “to promote a balanced growth of population, China will continue to uphold the basic national policy of population control and improve its strategy on population development” (Communist Party qtd. in Jiang). The elation felt was short lived because years of social expectations are still ingrained in the mind’s of the Chinese people. Preference for sons over daughters, especially in rural areas, is still prevalent, as well as the desire to raise only one