Geography essay

Responses to population issues, pro- natal and anti-natal

policies.

Nowadays in the 20
th
century many countries have the trouble of overcrowding or being
close to their own extinction. Due to this this I will explain in this essay and define what
exactly a pro and a anti-natal policy is and to which countries exactly they apply. This
essay will also explain why and since when the chosen countries introduced the policy
and what the advantages and disadvantages of such policies exactly are.

France-a pro-natal country:
Pro-natalism is when a government encourages couples or families to have children or
even more children then they already have. This often is the case when a government
needs a more youthful population or when a country is close to extinction of its
population, as it is the case in japan. Most highly developed countries have this problem
of a mostly very old population. To have a more youthful population governments give
certain privileges to pregnant women or to families with children, such as tax reduction,
cash incentives as they stay at home to care for their children, halve tuition fees for
governments childcare or day care, subsidised holidays and many more.
Countries like France for example are pro-natal countries because they want to
encourage their population to produce more children and it has the case of an aging
population. This means that there are more old people then young people and this is
highly contra productive for the government and the country in many ways. Too many
old people mean that more state funds go to the old people so that they are taken good
care of but also that there arent enough young people to bring the money spent on the
elder ones back into the countrys financial system. Another main issue of an aging
population is the extreme decrease of labour and the witch circular effect of again, less
and fewer children produced in the country. Due to these issues France has released and
passed the Code de la famille and is a pro-natal country since 1939. Also extremer
ways of encouraging women to have babies is that contraceptives cant be legally sold
in France any more since 1967.
To further explain, the advantages of a pro-natal policy are as follows. A higher birth
rate, which again exceeds the mortality rate so that the population rises. This causes the
labour available increase, which again is good for the countries economy. The
disadvantages are possible overcrowding of the country, which again leads to
emigration and is contra productive.

China-an anti-natal country:
Anti-natalism is the practice of not encouraging people to have children. This is to
avoid the needs and wants babies have. It is the need or the want to control the needs
babies and children have such as, food, water, care and education to not waste
resources and materials because they are simply not available or the government can
simply not afford to supply all this to the children once they are born. Governments can
also apply such policy to decrease the countrys population. This is the case when a
countrys population is too large and the country is over populated. In the year 1953 the
very first attempt of china s governement to chage something about the population
occurred. But back then the leader Mao Zedong though wanted the chinese population
to increase in order to to make china stronger. So the population, which was
583million at this time, grew by another 112million in the time from 1953 to 1964. As
the Chinese government realized that china was overpopulated and then began to
introduce the two child policy to china in 1970 using the slogan Later, Longer, fewer
before making the one child policy compulsory in 1979. This led to a population of
1.335million in 2010. The advantages of having an anti-natal policy, in a country are that
overcrowding and overpopulation is not possible. Less pressure will be on the food
resources. Of course does this policy have disadvantages too. Most families in the world,
especially in countries like china prefer boys over girls. Due to that most families have more
boys over time then girls because many Chinese families decide to abort a baby rather then
have a girl.

This essay has examined the impact, the advantages, the disadvantages and the reasons for
countries to apply a pro-natal policy or an anti-natal policy on two of the mostly developed
countries in the world. This has shown us how desperate some countries are to change
something about there population. But only extreme situations can cause extreme
regulations. And due to that I blame the Chinese government for making the Chinese suffer
from the one child policy. If the governments wouldnt have made such mistakes in the
first place they wouldnt have had to apply such policies.