You, a six-year-old girl from China, have a pretty good life. You are just learning to read Mandarin in kindergarten and have many little friends. One day, your mother, Li Mei, picks you up after school with some exciting news; she’s pregnant. You start to feel very excited about your new baby brother on the way. That night, your father pulls up in the driveway riding his bicycle after completing a fourteen hour shift. He has some not-so-good news. The factory that he worked at making silk was now shutting down for budgetary reasons and they weren’t even paying the workers for the last month of service. Money was already tight in your family but after this you can barely afford to stay in the one bedroom apartment that is your home. Because of the monthly fines that the government of China will put on them for having more than one child, your parents have no choice but to give you to an orphanage or leave you out on the street and try to forget about their first child. This is just one of the many times a family has been torn apart due to China’s one birth policy. This is just one of the many reasons this policy is a horrible answer to a not-so serious problem. This so-called “solution” has skewed the male to female population in China, caused many unnecessary riots and deaths, and destroyed families and their lives.

The first thing that is wrong with this awful decree is that it has completely wreaked havoc on the girls and male/female statistics in China. Because the world today is still a sexist place where it is hard for a woman to get ahead, when families an only choose one baby, they want it to be a boy not a girl. This is a horrible reality which is completely morally unjust as women can do just as much as men (and in high heels,) but it is a reality none the less. The average male to female ratio for the entire world is 106 females to 100 males. In China it is 100 females to 114 males, a difference of 20 males. Because China is such a huge country, this is not just spoiling China’s records, but the worlds records as well. This is also completely unfair to all the orphaned or aborted girls who can’t help their sex or the world they come into.

Another issue surrounding the one-child policy is that there have been many civilian riots and deaths. Since this issue is so controversial and people want to protest it there have been many outbreaks of riots. For example, in 2007, at least 20 population control officials and 40 protesters were killed in a series of violent riots and outbreaks in the southwestern Guangxi Autonomous Region of China. This is because officials were allegedly forcing pregnant woman already with another child into cars and driving them to abortion clinics where they were threatened into having abortions. This is obviously illegal and extremely heinous. If something is not done about this soon, more people will needlessly die.

Lastly, many marriages and families lives have been utterly decimated due to this horrible and unlawful law. Like in the example in the first paragraph, many happily married families get another baby on the way (purposely or accidentally) and because of various circumstances have to either abort the baby or give up the current one for adoption. Usually parents give up their children because they don’t have enough money to pay the fines or, since having two children has become taboo, society pressures them into giving it up for adoption. Losing a child is hard enough, but purposely killing or choosing to give up a child is enough of an emotional upset to ruin someone’s entire life. It is a horrible scenario to contemplate, but sadly it is one that every family living in China has to deal with every day.

In closing, this is a dangerous problem which threatens not only China but many other large growing countries. There have been an estimated 300 million babies aborted or given up because of this horrific law. These were 300 million people who never got the chance to be born, never got the chance to be loved and never got the chance to live. The Chinese government is not planning on regressing the fines or pressures on families and if something is not done now, more riots will break out, more families will be torn apart and more babies will needlessly die because of this unfair and unjust ordinance.