Future parents in Vietnam may be able to decide how many children they have, as health officials are currently in the process of revising the country’s loosely enforced two-child policy.
According to officials, letting parents decide guarantees their reproductive rights but could also exacerbate problems with population control, reports VnExpress. As such, the Ministry of Health recently submitted a plan recommending the central government do away with its long-standing two-child policy, thus allowing couples to have as many children as desired.
The news outlet added that Vietnam's population restriction law has been in place for a half-century. Since 2006, Vietnam has had great success in keeping its birth rate at two children per woman and, because of this policy, the country’s population growth has since plummeted from 1.5 million new babies a year to only 900,000.
While the two-child rule has kept Vietnam’s overpopulation problem in check, it has also opened the door to other issues, such as an aging population, a gender imbalance among newborns and soaring abortion rates. The local gender ratio at birth has become increasingly skewed in recent years, so much so that studies have shown Vietnam might face a shortage of women by 2050.
In 2015, the national ratio was 112 boys to 100 girls, compared to the global average of 107 boys to 100 girls.
[Photo via Pho Cap Boi]
