End of one-child policy too late for sterilized women

The end of China’s one-child policy, which the state-run news agency announced Thursday, will raise the cap, permitting families to have up to two children. But it comes too late for millions of Chinese women who were pressured to be sterilized.

China’s one-child policy, put into effect in 1980 at a time when the country’s leaders feared the economic pressure of overpopulation, has affected urban families most dramatically. The policy allowed exceptions for some ethnic minorities, rural families, families whose first child was a girl, and families where both parents were only children. As a result, 65 percent of Chinese families were exempted from the policy, though they still had to prove their eligibility to a bureaucrat to be permitted more than one birth.

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