{"id":316238,"date":"2024-07-26T16:43:22","date_gmt":"2024-07-26T21:43:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.liveaction.org\/news\/?p=316238"},"modified":"2024-07-26T13:40:06","modified_gmt":"2024-07-26T18:40:06","slug":"nonsensical-fertility-plummeting-india-coercive-population-control","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/nonsensical-fertility-plummeting-india-coercive-population-control\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Nonsensical’: As fertility rates plummet in India, some are calling for coercive population control"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Politicians in India have attempted for years<\/a> to institute a China-based population control model on the country’s citizens. Now, a new report<\/a> from the Population Research Institute (PRI) has revealed that the Jansankya Samadhan Foundation (JSF), an NGO, used the occasion of World Population Day to call for a two-child policy<\/em> to be put into place. PRI’s president calls the idea “nonsensical” due to the country’s current fertility crisis \u2014 and even one of the country’s largest fertility chains is raising the alarm.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe population controllers never give up,\u201d said PRI President Steven Mosher. \u201cForeign-funded NGOs have been calling for India to adopt a two-child policy for years. But this latest call is particularly nonsensical. The country\u2019s 2020 National Family Health Survey showed that India\u2019s Total Fertility Rate (TFR) is now below 2.0 children per woman. This is well below the 2.1 children needed to maintain a stable population.\u201d<\/p>\n

Damage has already been done<\/h3>\n

Despite this danger, efforts to curb or control births in India have already been unofficially implemented. The New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation<\/a> (ORF) claims India’s nearly 1.5 billion people<\/a> “put[] pressure on resources and services, leading to environmental degradation, poverty, and inequality,” and place extra burdens on “healthcare,” on “education infrastructure,” and employment. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has called on Indians to have fewer children<\/a> for the sake of the country’s future, while districts (BIMARU states) with higher fertility rates<\/a>, lower literacy rates, and lower education rates are considered “sick.”<\/p>\n

Far more extreme than the population control efforts currently in place in the United Kingdom<\/a> \u2014 where couples who give birth to more than two children are excluded from receiving certain government benefits for those additional children \u2014 JSF wants children in India born over the two-child limit to be deprived of birth certificates<\/em>, and their parents punished with up to 10 years in prison<\/em>, and\/or the loss of their government employment.<\/p>\n

But even without such coercive policies in place, damage has been done. A strong cultural preference for boys has led to skewed sex ratios<\/a>, and an estimated 13.5 million girls<\/a> have been killed in sex-selective abortions from 1987 to 2016. Women have also been subjected to mass sterilization camps<\/a>, or pressured into having needless hysterectomies<\/a>.<\/p>\n