One Child Policy Leaves Deep Scars in Chinese Society

This story first appeared in the Chicago Tribune:

On Thursday, China’s Communist Party announced it was abandoning its unpopular one-child policy after 35 years. But the scars still run deep.

In 2012, 6.7 million women in China were forced to have abortions under the one-child policy, according to official statistics. Rates in previous decades often topped 10 million a year. As a result, experts say, suicide rates among women in China are significantly higher than among men, in contrast to global norms.

Unimaginable numbers of girls are secretly aborted or killed in infancy every year by parents seeking boys, skewing the sex ratio dramatically.

In the past four decades, hundreds of millions of men and women have been forcibly sterilized or had intrauterine devices inserted, per Chinese family-planning policies.

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