China is the perfect example of why governments should stay out of family planning. This hapless regime has gone from the brutal restriction of births to paying couples to have children after its policies left the world’s most populous nation without the means to support its now aging population.

The Daily Mail is reporting on the new series of incentive policies designed to encourage couples to have a second baby in order to boost the country’s birth rate. When it abandoned its decades-long one-child policy in 2016 to allow couples to have two children, it expected the country’s birthrate to soar.

It didn’t.

Instead, it dropped to what is being described as “shockingly low levels” last year.

“Last year, the births in mainland China fell by 3.5 per cent to 17.23 million, compared to 17.86 million in 2016; while the birth rate – the number of live births per thousand of population per year – dropped from 12.95 in 2016 to 12.43, according to the National Bureau of Statistics of China,” the Mail reports.

At this rate, the world’s second most populous country – India – is expected to surpass to China in population by 2024.

Earlier this year, Chinese economist Ma Guangyuan said in a column published in Sina.com earlier this year that Chinese couples were simply unwilling to have a second child because it was too expensive to raise more than one child. In spite of surveys telling authorities that 60 percent of couples living in Beijing would opt for a second child, only 10 percent of families chose to do so.

This has caused regional authorities to launch a series of incentives to encourage couples to reproduce in order to boost the country’s birth rate. These include allowing all second children to enjoy free tuition for kindergarten, to receive extra housing benefits and better mortgage rates, and longer maternity leaves for second children. One city is offering couples up to $1,000 yuan ($150 US) to help subsidize medical bills for a second child.

Even the state’s newspaper, People’s Daily, published a column urging the government to do something about the country’s low birth rate, insisting that “having children has a special meaning to the Chinese people.”

It added: “Faced with a low birth rate, the government should adopt more effective measures to resolve the issue in order to satisfy people’s desire for a good life.”

Some insiders have suggested that the government is considering doing away with all limits on the number of children families can have and has already begun to study the repercussions of ending it’s two-child birth control rule.

But they better act fast. The country simply does not have enough people to support its aging population. At the present time, 17 percent of the nation’s population is aged 60 or older. That number could reach as high as 44 percent by 2050.

China’s dilemma is the perfect example of what happens when governments put unnatural family planning programs into force. These programs violate the laws of God and nature and do little more than wreak havoc on the population. This is why Pope Paul VI issued a strong warning in Humanae Vitae against allowing the power of preventing birth to fall into the state. “Careful consideration should be given to the danger of this power passing into the hands of those public authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law,” he wrote in 1968.

Complex matters of life and death belong in the hands of Someone Who has the brains to handle it – God. When man tries to intervene, he ends up creating a mess called China.

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