Editorial | More meaningful support needed for single mothers

China’s family planning agency says it will now intervene when unmarried mothers and teenagers seek abortions. It is not that long ago when the authorities were accused of using forced abortion to control population growth. The irony of an anti-abortion policy will not be lost on generations of families affected by the one-child policy from 1980 to 2016, when a declining birth rate prompted Beijing to scrap it.

By then it was credited with having prevented hundreds of millions of births and population growth that would have hindered economic growth, or huge improvement in per capita GDP. The plan shows just how much times have changed. The one-child policy has left the mainland with an ageing population that will weigh on the economy, but at the same time economic growth has created the means to encourage couples to commit to having more children, or to have a child at all.

The China Family Planning Association’s plan is heading in that direction. It said it would intervene to promote traditional family values and encourage people to have more children. This was meant to “improve reproductive health”. It called for pilot programmes to encourage Chinese to have more than one child. We trust this will include support for single mothers. Reproduction is up to individuals. Population growth cannot be engineered with administrative measures to force people to have children, as opposed to incentives and socio-economic conditions that encourage them to do so.

The association plan adds to evidence of China’s deep concern with demographic change and the causes. Many young people are deterred from having children by the costs and pressures of raising them in modern urban China, including a lack of childcare support. That said, these kinds of measures are not going to go very far without income support such as tax breaks, subsidies and the like.

Hopefully this is just part of a much more extensive policy change to provide support to families and single mothers. Many people who want to have children nowadays need help to do that. Thanks to massive economic growth during the one-child era, the mainland is now in a position to provide meaningful material support to these people and these families.