I recently asked a married couple who are friends of mine if they planned to have children now that they have settled into a life of domestic bliss.

The answer was no. They live on their own (implying they cannot rely on their parents for child care) and do not have the wherewithal to provide for a child.

I did not mean to question the legitimacy of their position. Their apparent reason for not having a child (not living with parents) is just one of many popular causes that might prompt a negative answer to the question.

Although the family planning policy is still meeting strong resistance in rural areas, in the more economically developed areas, more and more couples tend to approach the issue on purely financial or logistical terms.

Women caught in the web of structuring a career have to think a lot before deciding to go ahead and have a baby.

Their wages will be marked down significantly. If they work for a foreign company, maternity can be legitimate reason for them to be fired.

Child-bearing and child-raising always carry a negative monetary value. The choice for parenting is against common-sense self-interest.

Once the parents are trapped into child-raising, the baby will rope them into an attachment that is emotionally taxing and economically disastrous.

Hence, the steadily lowering birthrates in developed countries. Yes, there are plenty of economic benefits on offer there, but no amount of compensation can be a sufficient incentive.

But in China traditionally the matter is not something that attracts rational reflection.

For a rural couple, failure to produce issue still constitutes the cardinal filial sin. Carrying on the family line is still almost all that marriage is for.

And this intransigence lies deep at the root of peasant resistance to the family planning policy.

If more and more Chinese consider the matter purely in financial terms, we need to better prepare for its wide-ranging socio-economic impacts.

For instance, if we stick to the current one-child policy, a child born today will have to support, at some time in the future, six pensioners (two parents and four grandparents).

The greying of the population is already being felt, putting great strain on existing resources.

We never realize that the multitudes of rural women who risk losing their house and family property in giving birth to extra babies may be, to a degree, doing the country a public service.

Some argue that as more and more children are born into economically underprivileged rural families, there is a real danger of lowering demographic quality of life.

Well, social scientists are still debating the influences that go into the making of a person, but there is no denying that the family exists as a social institution that is central in importance to fostering the mental and spiritual development of children.

Ironically, the major providers for the bulk of future Chinese population are still the most deprived and impoverished.

We should not regard this in a cynical manner. We should understand that these children are the body of our future citizenry and labour force, and are most likely the providers for our old age. As public goods they deserve better care.

And we should strive to eradicate the economic disparity that harms the development of children.

Over the years we have been concerned about the effects of population explosion, but a healthy debate about the far-reaching effects of a shrinking population is long overdue.

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