China announced Oct. 29 that it will revoke the one-child policy, The Washington Post reports.
The Communist Party has decided that couples will now be able to have two children because of the “aging population.”
According to The Washington Post,
China’s unpopular one-child rule was introduced in 1980, and brutally enforced through huge fines, forced sterilizations and abortions, experts say. It empowered and enriched a huge swath of officials, with bribes often paid to skirt the rules.
It had also skewed China’s sex ratio, due to the selective abortion of girls, who are much less favored in traditional Chinese culture.
Calls to abandon the policy had reached a crescendo in the past decade, but the Communist Party moved slowly, relaxing the policy partially in 2013 before Thursday’s announcement.
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