Thirty-five years after enacting draconian birth control rules blamed for millions of forced abortions and the creation of a demographic “timebomb”, China could be on the verge of introducing a two-child policy. The new regulation, under which all Chinese couples would be allowed to have two children, could be implemented “as soon as the end of the year if everything goes well”, a government source was quoted as saying by the China Business News . The highly controversial and often brutally enforced one-child policy was introduced by China’s Communist leaders in 1980 amid fears of a catastrophic population explosion. The government credits it with preventing 400 million births, but the human cost has been immense, with forced sterilisations and abortions, infanticide, and a dramatic gender imbalance that means millions of men will never find female partners. In 2012 – in one of the most shocking recent cases of human […]