Here in America, we are trending towards smaller families. We’ve actually dropped below the “replacement rate” of two kids per couple. Recent statistics have said that the numbers are higher among Evangelicals – we tend to have a more optimistic outlook towards the future, and usually see more “arrows in our quiver” as a blessing – but the national stats indicate that, among legal US residents, the birth rate continues to decline.
Imagine what would happen if the government, rather than being a casual observer or collector of those statistics, tried to manage the numbers. What if some government organization tried to control the number of children being born?
Welcome to China.
There are various opinions floating around out there as to why the one-child rule was implemented. In Lost Daughters of China, journalist and adoptive mom Karin Evans points to political pressure from the West following famine and floods that killed tens of thousands throughout China during the height of the Cold War. Some say it is a logical extension of the nanny-state at its worst – as China industrialized, the government realized that fewer people gathering grain would require draconian measures to avoid more massive starvation or external dependence.
Regardless, the one-child rule is there.
So why are there so many girls available for adoption, and not so many boys?
In much of Asian culture (traditionally; this is slowly changing), a daughter is a member of your family only until she marries. After that, she is in her husband’s family. Here in the West, we tend to see a marriage as a joining of families (sometimes as a melding of dysfunctional unions); in the East, it is a pruning and grafting. The woman is pruned from her family and grafted to the family tree of the husband.
When China was 85% agrarian, that wasn’t such a big deal. You’d have six or eight kids to help work on the farm with roughly a 50/50 split in gender. The exchange evened out.
But then the government said, “Ixnay on the igbay amilyfay.” For those not fluent in pig latin, that means “one child.”
Hmm. With no social security system, your “retirement” plan was to have a few sons to take care of you when you got older. But now you can only have one child…and if that child happens to be a girl, where does that leave you? It isn’t that you don’t want a daughter – there is a very practical reality that having a daughter will leave you to fend for yourself in your old age, unless she marries a very generous man.
You have very few options.
So if you discover you are pregnant, you “go visit relatives in the country” and quietly enter an underground world of people who “know what to do” with you.
A little aside here – this underground system sounds a lot like what existed here when I was in high school. There were two girls in my senior class who “went to visit their cousins” for an extended and inconvenient time, and nobody was fooled. The difference is that the underground system in China is for any pregnant mom, regardless of marital status. It isn’t the pregnancy that is the “problem;” it is one of the potential outcomes.
So when the time has come, the baby is born. Depending on the people caring for the mother, one of a few things happens. If the child is male and appears healthy, big party. Otherwise, some midwives tell the mother the child is stillborn, and then proceed to make it so. That’s harsh, but the tale has been told hundreds of times by former assistants and mothers – too often to be strictly anecdotal. Other midwives tell the mother the same story, but arrange for the child to be taken to a public place and left. Still others give the child to the mother and let her decide what to do, or let the father’s family decide.
It is the child left in a public place who most often ends up in an orphanage. They are found every day, in markets, railways stations, at the gates of the orphanage. It offends or Western sensibilities, or is at least counter-intuitive; but the child who is abandoned at least has a chance.
Why don’t they just make an adoption plan like women often do here? China does not allow planning for adoption. I’ve heard of exceptions, but the average birth-mom in China has no legal ability to plan for her child’s adoption. Caring for these kids costs China millions of yuan each year, and I imagine someone has done some calculations on what would happen if they said, “Hey, just come on down to the Social Welfare Institute (the orphanage) and make a plan.” Leaving the child where she will be found is the adoption plan.
China has implemented an early form of social security. There has been some talk of allowing for a second child if the first is a girl. The Communist Party has been painting slogans in villages since Mao’s days – “Women hold up half the sky” was a quote from the Chairman himself (Mao, not Frank Sinatra).
But China moves in microns, not leaps and bounds.
