China’s One-Child Policy and Adoption
There are a lot of things I’m proud of being Chinese. And then there are some things I’m not so proud of. The taboo about adopting or taking in a child not of your own blood is one of my not-proud-things and the other is China’s one-child law.
You might be thinking:
What? What’s the one child law?
I’ve had many people ask me about this topic. Basically, China introduced a one-child per family law over 30 years ago. Depending on where you live, you cannot have more than one child. There’s also a ethnic rule as well. Both ways, I call it discrimination. They call it “family planning”.
My understanding is that you have to apply for a permit to have a child if your first child is a girl or has physical disability or mental illness. I don’t know if they require one to have the first child.
How do they enforce the law? If you have a second pregnancy (or more) hefty fines will be accessed. They say there are also pressures to abort a pregnancy, and forced sterilization accompanied second or subsequent pregnancies.
But what does this all mean? Why does this law bother me so much? After all, I was born and raised in America. Why do I care?
When I was 13 years old, I found out about this one-child law. This law bothered me because it leads to abandoned children – namely female children. Why? Because male children are more favored in our culture. Having a boy is essential in rural China because boys “bring home the bacon”. They work in the fields. They take care of their parents as they age. Because when you’re a boy, you stay with your family and when you marry, the girl comes to live with you. When you’re a girl, you’ll eventually leave the family and your lose your family. You basically “belong” to the family you marry into.
This basically leads me to my distaste for this law. This law has caused many baby girls to be abandoned or possibly left to die on road sides.
As a girl myself, this law made me very sad and upset. And so, it was at that moment, I made a decision that I would adopt a little girl from China when I was older.
There are a lot of rules and regulations to adopting from China… I won’t get into in this post.
My hubby finally agreed he was ready to accept the idea of adoption two years ago. That’s when I began my research. Then we found out we were pregnant. We attended an information session and found out we couldn’t begin our adoption process because we were pregnant. We had to wait until the little one was one years old before we could submit an application.
Now that Lil man is 13 months… we’re thinking of starting the process again. But there’s still a lot of red tape. So, we’ll see how this goes. Wish us luck.
Resources about the One-Child policy: