After years of imposing limits on children in family building, China is being forced to reverse course as it is desperate for babies and is now actually encouraging families to have more children amid its declining birthrates.
One province in China, Sichuan, is asking its residents to get busy getting busy — even if unmarried — to have more babies, The New York Times reported.
China's population shrunk last year for the first time since a national famine in the 1960s led to limits on children in the communist country.
Several cities in China are urging college students to donate sperm to help spur population growth and are making plans to expand national health insurance to cover fertility treatments, including I.V.F., according to the report.
At the heart of the population concerns is the large Chinese economy, which needs the workers. But it is the struggling economy that is keeping families from having children.
"The fundamental problem is not that people cannot have children, but that they cannot afford it," Lu Yi, 26, a nurse in Sichuan, told the Times.
She says she does not make enough to support a child in her family.
China's onetime one-child policy was put in place to keep the population from expanding too rapidly and has apparently worked to the effect of reducing the population for the first time, according to the report.
And expansion policies are not turning the trend around — so it is now as many babies as you can bear.
"The two-child policy failed; the three-child policy failed," University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher Yi Fuxian told the Times. "This is the natural next step."
Sichuan is China's fifth-largest province (84 million). It is allowing even unmarried parents to have as many babies as they want after limiting married families to just three.
"What many women, especially single mothers, lack is not money, but the protection of their rights and the respect of society," Zhang Meng, 47, a Shanghai single mother, told the Times.
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