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A History Timeline of Population Control

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The Infamous Tuskegee Study In recent history, we have seen the influence of occult population control advocates here in America. Nowhere is that influence better demonstrated than in the Tuskegee Study , a scientific research program in which 400 syphilis-infected black men were recruited by the U.S. Public Health Service back in 1932.

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Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang take a profound and upsetting look at Chinese families across multiple generations.

China's one-child policy lasted from 1979 to 2015, becoming such an organic part of the country's history and culture that it has been taken for granted around the world. With " One Child Nation," Nanfu Wang pulls back the veil to reveal its devastating history.

Working with co-director Jialing Zhang, the filmmaker explores years of persecution and widespread fear engendered by the government's enforcement of the policy. Using a remarkable personal lens, the film examines the reverberations of propaganda on broken families across multiple generations. The cumulative effect creates the sense that its destructive effects continue to be felt well beyond China's borders.

Wang first probed the country's broken justice system with her debut "Hooligan Sparrow," which focused on a child rape case - but she turned in a more intimate work with her second feature, "I Am Another You," in which she followed a young homeless man in America. With "One Child Nation," she consolidates those modes by fusing her massive subject matter with her own point of view through a candid voiceover. Now the mother of a newborn, Wang contemplates the future for her U.S.-born infant in the context of her own childhood.

Growing up in a rural city, she wound up with a brother, due to an exception in the policy that allowed for two children in families outside of urban areas so long as the offspring were separated by five years. But the country's trenchant enforcement of one-child households as the ideal way of life meant that her parents still lived under the pressure of the policy's dark ramifications. As she learns from contemporary interviews with her family, officials at her village attempted to sterilize her mother after she gave birth to her first child. She avoided that fate, but other families weren't so lucky, and Wang uncovers horrific accounts of women forced into crude surgeries that destroyed their lives.

In even more harrowing cases, children were aborted, confiscated, abandoned - and, in some cases, sold to orphanages around the world. Wang merges personal accounts of these efforts by many people from her inner circle, including grief-stricken village elders, while unearthing harrowing photographic evidence of the surgeries in question.

That would be enough for a shocking documentary all on its own, but "One Child Nation" goes beyond these traumas to reveal their impact on lost children sent to other countries. One of the movie's most intriguing passages revolves around the efforts of Brian and Long Lan Stuy, whose ongoing attempts to reunite adopted Chinese children with their birth parents involves a complex technological effort and many upsetting revelations about families torn apart.

As Wang veers from rumination about her own family to the broader context of the law in question, "One Child Nation" is a lot to take in, and sometimes strains from the sheer magnitude of the historical events. Fortunately, the directors maintain a brisk pace, uniting the disparate elements through Wang's ruminative voiceover and yielding an uncompromising expose in absorbing, essayistic terms.

Ultimately, the policy provides an entry point for exploring gender discrimination embedded in Wang's traditionalist household. Through photos she shares along with other bountiful archival material, she illustrates how her grandfather never posed for photos with her, considering only the men in the family to be sources of pride; when she attempts to connect with the elderly man now, she's met with disinterest, as he explains that her marriage meant that she belongs to somebody else's family now. In confrontations like these, Wang rarely appears on camera, instead standing behind the lens as the movie positions viewers within her conflicted perspective.

This troubling revelation points to the society's broader sexist inclinations, which led to many of the upsetting cases of abandoned infant daughters, including several instances in Wang's own extended family. As she coaxes several of her relatives to relive the past, she avoids an accusatory tone; living under the grip of propaganda and fear, they were driven to terrible extremes. But Wang herself refuses to accept the burden that tortures so many people close to her. "When every major life decision is made for you, it's hard to feel responsible for the consequences," she says.

As a brilliant combination of cultural reporting and interpersonal reckoning, "One Child Nation" manages to encapsulate decades of underreported events within a palatable narrative accessible to even to viewers with no prior understanding of the policy's history. Lacing the edit with images of posters and music designed to reinforce the country's repressive standards for family life, Wang reveals the intricate system that caused her and so many others to accept these restrictions throughout their youth and into early adulthood.

The movie's melancholic score matches Wang's meditative approach: She manages to unearth the painful ramifications of her upbringing without marginalizing other more harrowing accounts, including the details of forced abortions and infanticide. In a sense, she was one of the lucky ones, and while the movie doesn't exactly strike an optimistic note, it does imply some degree of spiritual catharsis as Wang comes to terms with her past and contemplates a much better future for the new addition to her family.

But she's wise to acknowledge that China's problems hardly ended in 2015. The country's insistence on controlling nearly every aspect of its population continues to haunt its citizenry, with the shift from one-child to two-child family policy yielding a whole new era of propaganda. In the somber finale, "One Child Nation" leaves the impression that while one upsetting chapter in China's history has ended, the next one has only just begun.

Grade: A-
"One Child Nation" premiered in the U.S. Documentary Competition at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking distribution.
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'One Child Nation' Review: China's One-Child Policy Comes Into Devastating Focus - Sundance

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Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang take a profound and upsetting look at Chinese families across multiple generations. China's one-child policy lasted from 1979 to 2015, becoming such an organic part of the country's history and culture that it has been taken for granted around the world.

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China's one-child policy was established by Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in 1979 to restrict communist China's population growth and limited couples to having only one child. Although designated a "temporary measure," it remained in effect for more than 35 years. Fines, pressures to abort a pregnancy, and even forced sterilization of women accompanied second or subsequent pregnancies.

The policy was not an all-encompassing rule because it was restricted to ethnic Han Chinese living in urban areas. Citizens living in rural areas and minorities living in China were not subject to the law.

There have long been reports that officials have forced women pregnant without permission to have abortions and have levied steep fines on families violating the law. In 2007 in the southwestern Guangxi Autonomous Region of China, riots broke out as a result, and some people may have been killed, including population control officials.

The Chinese have long had a preference for male heirs, so the one-child rule caused many problems for female infants: abortion, out-of-country adoption, neglect, abandonment, and even infanticide were known to occur to females. Statistically, such Draconian family planning has resulted in the disparate (estimated) ratio of 115 males for every 100 females among babies born. Normally, 105 males are naturally born for every 100 females. This skewed ratio in China creates the problem of a generation of young men not having enough women to marry and have their own families, which has been speculated may cause future unrest in the country. These forever bachelors will not have a family to care for them in their old age either, which could put a strain on future government social services.

The one-child rule has been estimated to have reduced population growth in the country of nearly 1.4 billion ( estimated, 2017) by as much as 300 million people over its first 20 years. Whether the male-to-female ratio eases with the discontinuation of the one-child policy will come clear over time.

Though the one-child policy may have had the goal of preventing the country's population of spiraling out of control, after several decades, there were concerns over its cumulative demographic effect, namely the country having a shrinking labor pool and smaller young population to take care of the number of elderly people in ensuing decades. So in 2013, the country eased the policy to allow some families to have two children. In late 2015, Chinese officials announced the scrapping the policy altogether, allowing all couples to have two children.

China's total fertility rate (the number of births per woman) is 1.6, higher than slowly declining Germany at 1.45 but lower than the U.S. at 1.87 (2.1 births per woman is the replacement level of fertility, representing a stable population, exclusive of migration). The effect of the two-child rule hasn't made the population decline stabilize completely, but the law is young yet.

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Did You Know China's One-Child Policy Has Changed?

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China's one-child policy was established by Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in 1979 to restrict communist China's population growth and limited couples to having only one child. Although designated a "temporary measure," it remained in effect for more than 35 years. Fines, pressures to abort a pregnancy, and even forced sterilization of women accompanied second or subsequent pregnancies.

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One of the gravest development issues most developing countries in the world are facing is population. As per United Nations population statistics, the world population grew by 30% between 1990 and 2010 which is an alarmingly high rate. Excessive population has various adverse effects including undue pressure on natural resources. More people mean more consumption which in turn means more exploitation of fixed and exhaustible resources. Also population is not a universal challenge. It is specific to nations whose economies have yet not achieved full potential and development. Along with China and India, the African and some Latin countries also see an extremely high population growth rate. Rather China, which is the most populated nation, has achieved a very appreciative control over their growth of population though their ways are highly autocratic and cannot be replicated in other countries.

Below are the most effective measures which can be employed to control population growth:

10. Delayed Marriages

The problem of child marriage is highly prominent in certain countries with high population like India, Pakistan or Bangladesh. A marriage at a tender age leads to a long span for giving birth. Also young age marriage devoid people of the education and awareness required to be sensitive towards and understand the consequences of raising too many children. A UN report has suggested that there would be a significant decline in world population if the legal for marriage is made 20 years.

9. Medical Facilities

One big drawback of developing countries is that of limited and highly centric medical facilities. Because of the high rural-urban divide in developing countries, availability of good hospitals and doctors is limited to urban centers thus resulting in high infant mortality rate in rural areas. Rural people, in order to ensure that at least some of their kids survive, give birth to more and more kids thus contributing to the population growth. If provided with optimum medical facilities population rate will almost certainly decline.

8. Legislative Actions

Not much result can be achieved from these if family planning and use of contraception remains optional instead of mandatory. Strict legal steps are required for child marriage, education, abolition of child labor and beggary and family planning to reap significant benefits from it. Proper enforcement of laws related to child labor, slavery and beggary will ensure that parents don't sell their children or send them out to work thus forcing them to raise lesser number of kids.

7. Providing Incentives

Incentives have proved to be an efficient policy measure in combating most development issues including population. Providing a health, educational or even financial incentive can be a highly effective population measure. There are certain incentive policies like paying certain some of money to people with not more than two kids or free or discounted education for single child etc. which are in place in most developing countries facing population related challenges and has also proved to be a useful measure.

6. Spread Awareness

People need to be told and made to understand the consequences of having too many children. Government and non-government institutions can carry awareness campaigns informing people how they will be unable to provide good nutrition, education or medical facilities to their children if they have too many. Population is also a reason for illiteracy and diseases and malnutrition and the negative effects of it are required to be communicated to the general public to expand their reasoning and understanding.

5. Women Empowerment

In most developing countries, the women folks are not considered equivalent to men in terms of force and might. Such opinions are extremely common in Islamic countries and even India and Bangladesh. Gender discrimination is a major reason for population growth. People keep giving birth to kids in order to have more sons than daughters. Empowering woman with a say in matters concerning them like child birth and educating them to fight against discrimination will ensure a healthy and aware society.

4. Eradicate Poverty

Why most poor countries have highest population growth instead of rich ones. Poverty has a direct relation to the population growth. In developing countries of Asia and Africa, child labor, slave trading and human trafficking is highly prevalent. African countries for example still have maximum reporting of slave trading though trading of humans is legally banned everywhere in the world. People give birth to kids and sell them to rich people who in turn employ these kids in various laborious and unethical tasks. If not sell, these parents force their kids to beg or work at a very tender so as to earn some extra money for the family. These people believe that more kids mean more hands for begging and work and thus more money. Without concrete measures for growth and poverty eradication, other methods of population control may prove to be ineffective.

3. Education

Education forms the backbone of an individual and economy. Once educated people know and understand the harms which a high population growth rate possesses. Education, especially women education, can work wonders in controlling population. An educated man and woman can readily understand the benefits of a small family. Without sufficient education most measures like awareness campaigns and women empowerment will prove to be insufficient and pointless.

2. Easy and Cheap availability of Contraceptives

Ensuring that people have easy and cheap access to contraception tools will help avoiding cases of unwanted pregnancies and births. Every state owned hospital should be made to provide cheaply efficient birth control medicines or surgeries since poor people have neither the means not awareness to use contraception. Use of condoms and contraceptives must be advertised and promoted along with ensuring cheap and ready access to these. Contraceptives do not only prove to be an important population control measure but also prevents spreading of sexually transmitted diseases like AIDS thus ensuring small healthy families.

1. Development

Why the enormous population and the increasing rate of it is the biggest challenge faced by the developing nations of Africa and Asia while the same is a little or no threat in countries like America, Europe or Japan. Lack of Development implies high poverty, high illiteracy, high discrimination, lack of awareness, lack of medical facilities and thus in turn increased population growth. Any economy is termed developed is its population is non-discriminated and just. By reducing discrimination between gender and class and ensuring development of the whole population instead of a given segment of society would eliminate the challenge of population growth for once.

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One of the gravest development issues most developing countries in the world are facing is population. As per United Nations population statistics, the world population grew by 30% between 1990 and 2010 which is an alarmingly high rate. Excessive population has various adverse effects including undue pressure on natural resources.

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Population control is the practice of intentionally controlling the growth of a population.  In the past, the goal of population control has been to grow the population. Nowadays, the efforts of population control are to try and decrease the world's population.

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Who has the right to decide who should have children (and how many)?

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Who has the right to decide who should have children (and how many)?

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No one has the right to decide who can have however many babies except the parents themselves. In the Roe vs. Wade case of 1973, the Supreme Court deemed abortions legal and the U.S. government was therefore restricted in its ability to determine the outcome of a pregnancy or childbirth in anyway. It is not just the U.S., there are only six countries worldwide that abortion is illegal in. With this logic in mind, no government should have right to determine who should have children or how many. If a government cannot by law interfere with the outcome of a pregnancy, than a government should not be able to legally determine how should become pregnant and how many babies one can bare. Only a couple can decide if they want to have children and how many children they want to have, which is evident in the legalization of abortion across the world.

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What measures should be taken to control the population of the world? 

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What measures should be taken to control the population of the world? 

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I believe that one measure that can be taken to control population is contraceptives and the accessibility to these contraceptives.  In the world today, condoms are the most common method of birth control. In the US, birth control is available for anyone of any age and you do not need parents consent to buy it. Withdrawal is not an effective method of birth control it is only effective 73% of the time.
Another solution could be smarter and better education for both men and women. Not education in terms of school but education in terms of abstinence education and sex education. There are more teen pregnancies in students that are given abstinence education instead of comprehensive sex education. Programs should be offered that detail puberty, intercourse, options of abstinence and birth control, and respecting the sexual rights and decisions of individuals. These programs will help prevent unwanted pregnancies and therefore reduce birth rates. In less developed countries, women's education is particularly important to controlling the population. Women who complete some form of secondary school will have on average less children, and have children later in life, than women who are less educated. Also, a solution could be to put prices on the cost of a child in terms of food costs, taxes, extra energy consumption, etc. These prices could persuade a couple to not have as many children or to wait longer into their lives to have children. The last solution to controlling population growth would be to end all policies that financially reward parents for having more children. Many governments base the amount of welfare and tax benefits families receive by the number of children they have. Governments should instead grant welfare to families based on solely parenthood, not by the number of children they have.

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- China's "one-child policy": This policy was put in place by the Chinese government in the 1980's the required Chinese families to only have one child. Males are preferred over females in Chinese culture so this led families to abort, neglect, abandon, and even infanticide females.
- Ancient Rome, during the time of Augustus, the Roman empire needed more manpower in order to gather more land and resources. They instituted laws that encouraged the Roman people to marry early and have lots of children.  The provided tax breaks for those whole complied with the laws.
- Delayed marriages: In countries such as India, Pakistan, or Bangladesh teen marriage is very prevalent and therefore leads to longer birth giving years.