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State bodies in two superpowers have recently sent signals that they are preparing to outlaw or severely restrict the right of women to obtain a legal abortion. Both messages, if turned into policy, will reverse decades of legal access to birth control for billions of people and will risk both a humanitarian disaster and a policy regime that amounts to forced childbirth.

One of those superpowers has attracted far more attention.

People around the world reacted in shock to the leaked draft ruling by a right-wing majority of judges on the United States Supreme Court to reverse its famous 1973 ruling against government restrictions on the medical rights of pregnant women. The draft caused widespread international outrage both for its dark humanitarian implications and for its seeming violation of the U.S. Constitution’s famous protections of personal liberty. It also seemed weirdly out of step with the times, in a country where the great majority of citizens are in favour of unrestricted abortion rights.

Likely to affect even more lives, however, is the similarly rapid policy reversal in China.

It has probably attracted less attention both because it has been couched in euphemistic language, in a country that much of the world still associates with population-restriction policies that sometimes led to compelled abortions, and because it is being done for different reasons. If Americans are victims of a high court packed with judges who favour a religion-inflected reading of the law, Chinese are victims of a regime that has panicked over population figures, and chosen to punish women for them.

China’s birth-control panic reached a peak last year, when official statistics showed that the national fertility rate had plunged far further than officials had predicted, to an official 1.5 children per mother (the actual rate is thought to be even lower), and that only 10.6 million babies had been born that year in a country of 1.4 billion. That was five years after Beijing abandoned its infamous one-child policy and replaced it with two-, three- and unlimited-child policies.

Those policies do not appear to have worked at all – something Beijing should have known, since the one-child policy famously played almost no role in reducing the country’s birth rate.

This year China will almost certainly become a country with a declining population. That ought to be a welcome development, in a resource-scarce country containing a fifth of the world’s people. But President Xi Jinping knows that his hardline regime’s public legitimacy depends almost entirely on maintaining double-digit rates of growth, which is mathematically hard to imagine in a country with a shrinking workforce and a growing proportion of pensioners.

Other countries, such as Canada, long ago responded to such demographic pressures with higher tax rates and immigration. These are unacceptable to Mr. Xi and his colleagues, so they have turned to pressuring Chinese women.

As feminist scholar Leta Hong Fincher observed last year, Beijing’s move to replace the one-child policy with two- and three-child policies is accompanied by a push for “high-quality” births – that is, children of the majority Han ethnicity born to young mothers. “I think if Beijing had its way, they would just announce a nationwide ban on abortion,” she said in March. “But they can’t do that … So they may be edging closer to systematic restrictions on abortions for women starting around the edges.”

The Chinese governments’ State Council introduced a policy last September to reduce “not medically necessary” abortions. In February, the national family-planning association announced that the country would launch an “abortion intervention campaign,” officially to reduce abortions among teenagers but thought to be aimed more widely. State-controlled media now frequently contains anti-abortion messages, sometimes sounding – not coincidentally – like voices from the United States.

These birth-control restrictions are unlikely to achieve their intended goal. There’s considerable research showing that Chinese couples have fewer children than they want primarily because housing is so expensive and there’s little support for women seeking to keep working while raising children – a necessity in the current economy.

“With a strong unwillingness to offer significant financial assistance to families and promote a friendly environment for women and children, the Chinese authorities instead are turning to … a path that dehumanizes and oppresses women with the goal of increasing its declining birth rate,” says Chauncey Jung, a formerly Beijing-based policy analyst who now works in Ottawa.

The two superpowers, otherwise deeply at odds with one another, have found a common language around reproductive choice – the Chinese internet already echoes with talk of the U.S. court’s draft ruling. “China will no doubt learn from America’s efforts to limit abortion,” says obstetrics-gynecology professor Yi Fuxian. It is not the right lesson to be taking from the United States.

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