It is impossible to overstate both how crucial the one-child policy is to China's stability and how rigidly it is enforced. Everyone agrees that if the population, already at 1.2 billion, is allowed to grow, the result will be economic collapse, environmental ruin, famine.
But while most Chinese citizens can accept the mathematics of the problem, the population continues to rise. Every year, some 21 million children are born. In March, President Jiang Zemin was forced to set new, tougher population-control policies and tougher punishments for those who ignore them.
According to author Steven W. Mosher, coerced abortions, sometimes just days before the baby is due, are now commonplace, as are reports of enforced sterilization and of hospitals fatally injecting second babies shortly after their birth. This means, Mosher says, that "however overcrowded China's orphanages are now with baby girls, the problem is going to get worse. Very much worse."
'A Holocaust of Little Girls' orig. article in South China Morning Post (Hong Kong) reprinted in World Press Review, September 1995, posted online as course material at Brooklyn CUNY by Paul Halsall 1999 and found and posted by the astonishingly referential plepher bound foot
