Infanticide

Infanticide is a general term for the murder of a child aged less than 1 year, and filicide is used when the perpetrator is the parent, but neonaticide is used to refer to deliberate killing of a child up to 24 h of age by his or her parent.

China

During Mao Zedong's leadership in China, the birth rate fell from 37 per thousand to 20 per thousand. Infant mortality declined from 227 per thousand births in 1949 to 53 per thousand in 1981, and life expectancy dramatically increased from around 35 years in 1948 to 66 years in 1976. Until the 1960s, the government mostly encouraged families to have as many children as possible, especially during the Great Leap Forward, because of Mao's belief that population growth empowered the country, preventing the emergence of family planning programs earlier in China's development.

The state tried to incentivize more childbirths during that time. Policies such as "Mother Heroine" (Chinese: 英雄母亲) from the Soviet Union was one of the measures the Communist government took. As a result, the population grew from around 540 million in 1949 to 940 million in 1976. Although China's fertility rate plummeted faster than anywhere else in the world during the 1970s under these restrictions, the Chinese government thought it was still too high, influenced by the global debate over a possible overpopulation crisis suggested by organizations such as the Club of Rome and the Sierra Club.

The one-child policy was originally designed to be a "One-Generation Policy". When one child policy was first introduced, 6.1 million families that had already given birth to a child were given the "One Child Honorary Certificates". This was a pledge they had to make to ensure they would not have more children. Mandatory contraception consisted of an insertion of an intrauterine device (IUD). Between 1980 and 2014, 324 million Chinese women received IUDs and 108 million were sterilized.

The most widely used alternative to IUD installation is sterilization. As the leading form of contraception in China, sterilization includes both tubal ligation and vasectomy. Since the beginning of the 1970s massive sterilization campaigns swept across China. Urban and rural “birth planning” and “family planning” services situated themselves in every community. In 1983 mandatory sterilization occurred after the birth of the second or third child. As the restrictions tightened a few years later, if a woman gave birth to two children, legally she had to be sterilized. Alternatively, in some cases her husband could be sterilized in her place.

In the early years of the sterilization campaigns, abortion was a method of birth control highly encouraged by “family planning”. With 55 percent of abortion recipients as repeat customers and the procedure being easily accessible, women have chosen to abort and forced to abort because of laws, social pressures, discovery of secret pregnancy, and community birth quotas. Some women even in the 2000s chose or were encouraged to use traditional abortive products such as Blister Beetles, also known as Mylabris. Women would ingest the toxins orally or by means of douching with the hopes of inducing abortion.

Those who violated the one child policy could lose their job, their title, a portion of medical insurance, the chance of higher levels of education of the second child, labeling of the second child as a “black child” and the parents could face sterilization. Being excluded from the family register means they do not possess a Hukou, which is "an identifying document, similar in some ways to the American social security card". In this respect they do not legally exist and as a result cannot access most public services, such as education and health care, and do not receive protection under the law.

Gender-selected abortion or sex identification (without medical uses), abandonment, and infanticide are illegal in present-day Mainland China. Nevertheless, the US State Department, and the human rights organization Amnesty International have all declared that Mainland China's family planning programs, called the one child policy (which has since changed to a two-child policy), contribute to infanticide. The sex gap between males and females aged 0–19 years old was estimated to be 25 million in 2010 by the United Nations Population Fund.

“There is a strong cultural bias in rural China against baby girls, sometimes known as "maggots in the rice". There is a saying that "raising a daughter is like watering someone else’s fields", a sign of how deep-rooted the pro boy bias is. Boys carry on the family name but, for a girl, families need to find a dowry when she marries into someone else’s family.”.

There are 37 million more men than women in China, the most unbalanced gender ratio in the world. This skewed ratio has worsened since China introduced the one-child policy 30 years ago to curb population growth, making abortion a widely used method of familyplanning, and sometimes infanticide. The government reckons it has prevented 400 million births. The gender gap raises the prospect of millions of men unable to find a wife, risking antisocial and violent behaviour. There are already 18 million more men than marriageable women.

“Thousands of baby girls are abandoned every year, some on rubbish heaps. Others end up in the "dying rooms" of orphanages where they die of neglect.”.

The term one-child policy refers to a population planning initiative in China implemented between 1980 and 2015 to curb the country's population growth by restricting many families to a single child. That initiative was part of a much broader effort to control population growth that began in 1970 and ended in 2021. Implementation of the policy was handled at the national level primarily by officials who used pervasive propaganda campaigns to promote the program and encourage compliance.

“Researchers have found that the gender of the firstborn child in rural parts of China impacts whether or not the mother will seek an ultrasound for the second child. 40% of women with a firstborn son seek an ultrasound for their second pregnancy, versus 70% of women with firstborn daughters.”.

The strictness with which it was enforced varied by period, region, and social status. In some cases, women were forced to use contraception, receive abortions, and undergo sterilization. Families who violated the policy faced large fines and other penalties, such as firings and restrictions for future careers.