Scanning through the Globe and Mail, as per my habit every morning, I came across an editorial by Lysiane Gagnon that critiqued a column by Diane Francis. In the editorial she expresses her opposition to Ms. Francis's thesis that a global one-child policy is a viable strategy for controlling resource usage and for "saving the world" from consequences such as environmental degradation and climate change. Indeed, the byline is "Adopting China's one-child policy won't save the Earth".
What absolute shit. It's very easy to dismiss a contrary view by linking it to spectres of communism and tyranny, as Ms. Gagnon applied artlessly to Ms. Francis's column. In my experience, such tactics are applied to cover for deficiencies in analysis. Ms. Gagnon's article was more about expressing her revulsion of China's one-child policy than it was about refuting its feasibility and viability. I'll say right off the bat that China's one-child policy is not perfect, not even close. As Ms. Gagnon's article mentions, there are abuses such as forced abortions and sterilisations by elements of a corrupt Chinese bureaucracy to enforce the policy. However, this doesn't mean that the one-child policy cannot be implemented feasibly. Indeed, the official policy is financial coercion in the guise of fines to prevent people from having a second child without approval. Moreover, China's one-child policy is not absolute and varies from population to population and from region to region. For instance, ethnic minorities and rural populations are allowed to have more than one child without approval as a form of affirmative action and to prevent male-biased child selection. Even Shanghai, a huge urban metropolis, has loosened restrictions on having children due to the excessive success of the one-child policy. There are nuances and complexities to China's one-child policy, summarised well in the Wikipedia entry on the one-child policy, that are not mentioned in Ms. Gagnon's article. What was most egregiously offensive to me was the insinuation that the one-child policy is excessively cruel. What would be excessively cruel, Ms. Gagnon, is uncontrolled birth rates that would have kept many Chinese in poverty with all attendant consequences. Case in point? Look at India.
Ms. Gagnon also underestimates the power of religion to potentially obstruct a global one-child policy. I won't go in depth in to this, but I'll point out that the Pope, putative spiritual leader of a billion Catholics, opposes prophylactic and termination approaches to birth control. I wonder what he'd say about a global one-child policy. Actually, I wonder what any leader of an Abrahamic religion would say about a one-child policy. Likely speaking, nothing flattering.
Controlling birth rates as an end to controlling and conserving resources should be a no-brainer to anybody capable of critical thought. Yes, there are problems with how China implemented it, be it a surplus young male population, unequal application of the policy, tyrannical coercive measures like abortion, "egocentric" children (actually I'd like to refute this too but this post is getting too long), reduced tax and social support base, and other problems I haven't thought of, but the feasibility of a humane and financially-coercive one-child policy is not of doubt to me.
I would challenge Ms. Gagnon to do some research and critical thinking the next time she decides to comment on a complex issue such as population control.
