Life Links 9/19/11

In the Weekly Standard, Jonathan Last writes about China's one-child policy and its supporters.

It's hard to know what's at the root of all this admiration. Part of it may be a reaction to the gauche American habit of having children. Push environmentalists hard enough and eventually they devolve into overpopulation hysterics. Or perhaps appreciating One-Child is, like following professional soccer, just a way of peacocking moral superiority.

But the more charitable (and likely) explanation is that people who claim to admire China's One-Child policy simply don't know very much about it. Like where it came from. Or how it actually works. Or what it has really done to China's demographics. Joe Biden may not be willing to second guess One-Child, but many Chinese demographers are doing just that because they are terrified by what it has done to their country. The people who care most about One-Child—the Chinese—spend a lot of time these days not praising the policy but trying to figure a way out of it. Because it turns out that One-Child wasn't so much a policy as a trap.

At the end, Last discusses how years of China's one-child policy may have so dramatically changed how the Chinese view children that even if it was rescinded, it wouldn't matter.


Along those same lines, here's an article in the China Post about the rising trend in Taiwan for married couples to abort their first child. Taiwan's total fertility rate in 2010 was 0.895.


Pro-choice tolerance at it's finest. Georgia State students mindlessly chant "Trust Black women" but don't listen to a black woman who wants to speak to them.


A ballot proposal to legalize abortion in Liechtenstein failed.

Opponents won the referendum with a majority of 514 votes, out of 11,510 ballots cast. The official count put no-votes at 52.3 percent, ahead of 47.7 percent who favored the plan to decriminalize abortion in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy or if the child is severely disabled.

The local DC FOX affiliate has an interview/debate on Virginia's new abortion regulations between Chris Freund, vice president of The Family Foundation and Tarina Keene, the executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice America.