Free Republic

When China put in place its one-child pol­icy four decades ago, pol­icy mak­ers said they would sim­ply switch gears if births dropped too much. That has turned out to be not so easy. “In 30 years, the cur­rent prob­lem of es­pe­cially dread­ful pop­u­la­tion growth may be al­le­viated and then [we can] adopt dif­fer­ent pop­u­la­tion poli­cies,” the Com­mu­nist Party said in a 1980 open let­ter to mem­bers and young peo­ple. With the num­ber of births de­clin­ing year af­ter year, China is now rac­ing in the op­po­site di­rec-tion, clos­ing abor­tion clin­ics and ex­pand­ing ser­vices to help cou­ples con­ceive. But a legacy of...