The Future for China's Children

So China has become severely devastated by earthquakes in the past weeks. My heart goes out to everyone being affected. There is one thing that I found interesting about the whole thing, the lift on the banned for having ILLEGAL children. So there was a law implement in the 1970's for a one child limit in China due to overpopulation. Within this are a few loop holes. A family can have another child if the first child was a girl. Right there is one problem. Men are seen as the only possible heirs that families have so right now there are probably thousands of orphan girls. The reason for this being that families are charged per child after the first child. The first child is allotted many freedoms that the country allows, like education, while any additional children have to be paid for. On top of having to supply for each child that a family can have, they have to pay taxes on each child after the first one. Well to me this is bring to mind an issue of slavery, or better yet the 3/5ths rule. So China makes it very expensive and difficult for families with multiple children.

So let's revisit the case in which a family is allowed to have a second child, if their first born happens to be a girl. Let's say that they are lucky enough to have a boy, then the boy will get all the rights, that the oldest child once received and the family will have to pay for having the girl in the household. This necessity for having a male child has lead to an increase in abortions, abandoned girl children and an increase in the male population.

Now back the the earthquakes. With death tolls reaching into the hundreds of thousands, China is thinking to bend a few of the one child per family rules. For one the death of parents is causing many children to become orphans overnight, and families are being affected also with the loss of children. Therefore the families that only had the one child, are now childless. Now for the families that had more than one child and the oldest was a boy and happened to die, families can apply for one of their other illegal children to take their place, so as not to continue paying taxes, or if any of the other children died in the multi-person family, then the family can apply to not have to continue to pay taxes on their dead children.
So at this point no one can tell what lies in store for the future of this law. Maybe the abandoned children will get a family, or maybe this will just spark another baby boom.