(Wall Street Journal) – Cast aside in favor of sons, some women say trauma of one-child policy shattered their sense of family

Having scrapped the one-child policy, the Communist Party is now championing the term “family values” and pressuring women to have more children as it grows increasingly anxious over China’s shrinking population. Those pressures are colliding with the lingering—and never addressed—emotional toll of decades of draconian enforcement of birth restrictions.

Dai and countless other women not only witnessed their parents’ pain over children abandoned or never born but were themselves made to feel that they were mere obstacles in the family’s quest for a son. Some of these women now say the sense of feeling unloved and uncared for shattered their very concept of family, part of a backlash by women who resist getting married or having any children at all. (Read More)