China, hands off my baby

By Amanda Seef
NEWS EDITOR

China is approaching another new milestone for their country’s policies. After they enacted a law on the amount of children one could have in 1979, they are now considering removing the law, allowing citizens to have more than one child per family.

The United States hasn’t enacted this law, and probably won’t, but the chances of something like this happening to me is frightening. I’m not Chinese and don’t plan on becoming Chinese any time soon, but keep your hands off my baby, China.

Many couples in China have abortions or send their daughters to orphanages because they’re only alloted one child. They would rather have a son. For whatever reasons that may be, the country is soon going to be a sea of men — good in some instances, but when it comes to controlling everything … the country is going to fall apart. If there was one steady reason for China to rid themselves immediately of this law, it would be so that the entire country isn’t ran strictly by men.

China must be getting senile. (Previously there had been a huge birthing boom, and then it was cut considerably, considering that the country is filled to the brim with people and factories.)

Putting laws into effect to control the number of children one can have is ridiculous, and makes little to no sense to me. I can understand abortion laws, though I am not a fan. If you wanted to actually do something with this law, other than quell the rights of many individuals, it would be to enact it for teenage pregnancies. Who really wants to have a child at age 15? Teens are busting out the kids faster than they can take trigonometry tests.

Clearly the U.S. and China are two separate places with plenty of differences in government, but we also have a lot of influence on each other. I assume since it’s been nearly 30 years since the law was originally put into place, that the U.S. will not be putting such a rights violation into action.

If I were going to die, or my child were going to die, or even if the world were going to blow up if I had two or three children — I can understand restrictions.

With the knobby knees of the healthcare and security systems, however, it seems that laws of this sort are focusing on the wrong thing. They are restricting the rights to bring new life into the world, instead of focusing on the true problems at the root of the government.

From my calculations, families can grow as large as 10 members, depending on when the next generation begins. Three people in China is a family. Three’s not a family — it’s a crowd. It takes four or more to have a family. Although my own family is not a big family, it’s much bigger than 10 people, and feels cozy.

If and when I decide to have an appropriately planned pregnancy, the country will not take that away. If only Chinese officials started to think like me faster.