Beijing – The China’s ruling Communist Party has abolished the one child policy and declared that couples in the country are now allowed to have two children.
The policy had earlier barred them not to have more than a child for about three decades.
A communiqué issued at the end of a panel meeting of the party’s Central Committee, Thursday, explained that the decision was taken to improve the balanced development of population and to deal with an aging population – the meeting aimed to chart the country’s economic and social development through 2020.
The China one child policy was introduced in 1979 – with a population of 1.4 billion people; it was aimed at attaining a temporal measure to control its population growth in order to manage the available resources.
This restriction further led to force abortion (mostly of female fetuses), preference for the male child – imbalance sex ratio (male to female babies), and a decline in fertility rate which has made them to have fewer births than expected. Violation of this rule made Couples to be forced to pay a fee in proportion to their income.
In November 2013, the party announced that it would allow couples to have two children if one of the parents is a single child, the first substantial easing of the policy in nearly three decades.
However, the government credits the one-child policy with preventing 400 million births and helping lift countless families out of poverty by easing the strain on the country’s limited resources.
