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From: susan@vaxwaller.UUCP (Susan Finkelman)
Newsgroups: net.abortion
Subject: Re: Channel 13 documentary on China
Message-ID: <250@vaxwaller.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 16-Apr-85 15:30:16 EST
Article-I.D.: vaxwalle.250
Posted: Tue Apr 16 15:30:16 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 20-Apr-85 08:08:30 EST
References: <748@mhuxt.UUCP>
Organization: Varian, Walnut Creek, CA
Lines: 67



In your description of the Chinese situation you neglected to mention
that the one child permitted a family in the model towns would be
assured excellent daycare, health care and education.  This is
an incentive for parents to limit their families.  I wonder if such
care were assured here to women with unwanted pregnancies (at present
even those of us which planned children often cannot find or afford 
such things) that perhaps the abortion rate would drop.

(orignal article follows)
> 
>     I was flipping the channels of the tube recently when a documentary on
> China's overpopulation problem and the steps the chinese government has been
> taking to solve it.  I stopped to watch the rest of it, and thought that
> it might be of some interest to net.abortion readers.
>     I'll attempt to describe the documentary first, and save my comments till
> later:
>     They started out by explaining just how tough the problem currently is,
> with the aid of a graph of population vs. time.  In historical times, the
> land that is currently China supported a population which was a *tiny* fraction
> of the size of their current population.  With the advent of the industrial
> revolution and modern medicine, china's population began ramping up until it
> had reached 500 million by the time of the revolution.  The graph they were
> using became essentially vertical after that point, and the population has
> now reached ~1 billion.  All of the farmable land in china, divided into this
> population leaves 1/5 acre per person, just *barely* enough to produce enough
> food to feed one person.  Moreover, due to the recent population increases,
> much of the population is still young and of childbearing age.
>     The government's plan is to try to have only one child per couple for the
> next hundred years of so.  With this plan in effect, China will go through
> 10-15 lean years as the population peaks at 1.2 billion in the year 2000,
> and there is only 1/7 acres of farmland per person.  Without this plan, there
> will be 1.4 billion chinese by the year 2000, unless people start starving
> to death before then.
>     In order to put this plan into effect, the government has chosen a few
> model towns in which to achieve this low birthrate to demonstrate that it
> is possible.  The people making the documentary were allowed to interview
> a woman who had already had her one child, and had just been 'persuaded' to
> have her third abortion, this one in her eighth month.  It was very sad.
> It seems that she had been attempting to hide her pregnancy, hoping to have
> a son this time, and she went unreported until her seventh month, when a
> 'family planning' counselor was assigned to persuade her to have an
> abortion.  They also interviewed this woman, the counselor, who actually
> did seem to be very concerned about the health and well-being of the
> pregnant woman, and who also seemed to be very relieved that she had been
> successful in persuading the other woman to have  an abortion before she
> gave birth.  No questions were asked either woman concerning their
> opinion of the morality of the whole business.  The counselor also said
> that she had tried to persuade the woman to be sterilized, but that she
> was unsuccessful.
> 
> End of description of documentary.
> 
> Long-time readers of net.abortion know that while I am pro-choice, I would
> not be opposed to a law which limited abortions to the first trimester or
> so.  Personally, I am appalled at the idea of an abortion in the eighth
> month of pregnancy, but cannot help but wonder if it is kinder than letting
> the kid grow up to starve to death when they are 15.  
> 
> I don't have an easy solution to the dilemna the chinese face.  I'm sure
> pro-lifers will condemn the chinese government for its solution, but would
> they rather see the chinese use Malthus' solution?
> -- 
> Jeff Sonntag
> ihnp4!mhuxt!js2j
>     "Pulled a muscle in my ear!"-Penfold