China now pushing women toward more childbirth: Report

From the strict one-child policy to curb population, China is now pushing women to bear more children to boost the dwindling demographics, said a media report.

The Myanmar-based MeKong News reported that over the past four decades, the state, not women, has been dictating the country’s birth policies.

While the one-child policy, introduced in 1979, was justified as an urgent brake on population growth, the country is now forcing women towards more children as it stares at a demographic collapse. As per official data released in January, the number of births in 2025 fell 17 per cent year-on-year to 7.92 million -- the lowest recorded since population records began in 1949.

“Beijing still treats reproduction as a lever of economic planning, not as a matter of personal freedom,” the report said.

With an aim “to accelerate development, lift incomes and ease pressure on resources”, the one-child policy subjected scores of women to forced abortions, involuntary sterilisation, and intense pressure tactics, including detention, fines, and harassment.

The state coercion "became an enforcement mechanism embedded into local governance, where compliance was treated as administrative performance,” the report said, adding that it resulted in not just demographic control, but also the institutionalisation of reproductive surveillance. Furthermore, the traditional preference for sons also skewed the country's sex ratio.