Women Resisting Three Child Policy: How China's Birth Rate Fell Continuously

As per recent reports, women in China are getting sceptical about the three-child policy, although the Chinese Communist Party is offering newlyweds a total of 30 days of completely paid holiday as a part of the policy.

The main cause behind the decline in the birth rate is the one-child policy imposed between 1980 and 2015, and the rise in education costs that makes Chinese people go against having more than one kid or no kid at all.

China Birth Rate Falls Continuously

The government of China implemented the one-child policy for around 35 years, forcing millions of women to opt for forced contraceptives, sterilisation, and abortion. Due to the plummeting birth rates, the government moved from one child to two children in 2016. But couldn't find the desired results with even that. The government however shifted to the three-child policy in 2021 and even offered benefits such as tax cuts, cash rewards and subsidies to those who followed the policy.

But none of the initiatives by the government seems to be working as per the voice against the aristocracy, and the birthright and China are continuously declining whether the total fertility rate decreased from 2.6 percent which was in the late 1980s to just 1.15 in the year 2021, as a matter of fact, in the year 2022, the population in the country might have declined for the first time ever since the great famine of 1959 to 1961, as per the projections by the Shanghai Academy of social sciences.

However, the three-child policy has met with a lot of widespread cynicism through the online medium as people are opposing it, women from the country China have started to resist the three-child policy mainly because the burden of child care is their responsibility solely and its adverse effect on their career. As per a study conducted in 2020, the impact of family planning policy is different for urban women as 45 percent of them reported that their employment and career were getting adversely affected by pregnancy or child-rearing. 1/3rd of all the respondents reported financial loss and about 20% of them talked about losing an opportunity for training or promotions.

About 30 percent of the respondents said that they were fired or forced to resign from their work just because of their pregnancy and about 8 percent said that they experienced demotion which points out the fact that companies do not want to hire women employees who might not be able to work continuously during their pregnancy and have the chances of taking maternity leave.

Although China has created a proper ecosystem to ensure that the fertility rate in the country increases, couples who were of reproductive age are being offered various benefits and incentives so that they will be compelled to have three children but yet China's population fell last year in six decades and, China recorded its lowest birth rate ever Which was 6.77 births per thousand people.

The government should be focusing more on reducing discriminatory, gender, norms related to child care, responsibilities and insured, show the end of discriminatory, parent Lee policies and expand the parental leave policies and protection for both genders who wish to take it, they should also be focused on ensuring the availability and affordability of child care and another form professional caregiving in the country and last, but not the least the government must abolish the three child policy because it should be a woman's fundamental right to decide how many kids she wants to have and shouldn't be compelled by the government to make this decision.

Suggested reading: China Amends Marriage Leave Policy To Boost Birth Rate: What About Single Parents?