In the 1980s the Vietnamese government introduced a law prohibiting its citizens from having more than two children, mostly for economic reasons. The two-child population policy was eventually relaxed in 2003, partly due to international pressure against coercive family planning policies, and replaced with a policy simply encouraging small family practice. Vietnam has an estimated population of 86 million, with some parts of the country among the most densely populated in Asia.
In December of 2008, however, legislators began to fear that a population boom was jeopardizing the country’s development and straining resources and began to consider reinstatement of the law. The number of families with a third child was 10 per cent higher than the previous year by the third quarter. If approved, government employees who have a third child risk being denied pay raises and employee advancements and even those civil servants who supposedly enforce the law will be reprimanded. The new policy would also impose fines on parents for any third and higher-order children. The only people exempted from the law will be ethnic minorities and those families who have two children but one is disabled.
In a country where boys are favoured over girls, parents are pressured to ensure they are provided for in their old age and that the family line is carried on. As a patrilineal society, this preference has already given Vietnam one of the highest abortion rates in Asia, with the United Nations reporting one abortion for every two lives births in the country. This translates into the likelihood of two abortions per woman in the country. At the current rate, by the year 2030, more than four million Vietnamese men will not be able to find a bride.
The continued poverty in rural areas was one of the main reasons for the return to the two-children-per-family policy, said a representative who was attending a recent Asian forum of Parliamentarians on Population and Development in Hanoi. The government of Vietnam has been on a mission to increase its viability on the global economic stage, further influencing its policies.
The decision appears to present an additional problem as Vietnam had agreed at a 1994 United Nations International Conference on Population and Development to allow voluntary family planning. However, Vietnamese officials claim that the agreement was not international law and that it is not bound by it.
UN sources are questioning the return of the policy as Vietnam’s fertility rate has fallen from 3.8 children per woman in 1989 to 2.1 today, obviously a social success. But some Vietnamese officials nonetheless fear that a population mini-boom may be occurring. In neighbouring China, laws restrict most families to one child. Despite this policy, China's fertility averages around 1.8 children per woman, indicating widespread exceptions to or evasions of the policy.
Fertility rates that stay consistently at two children per woman allow a population eventually to stop growing in the absence of significant net immigration. Most eastern Asian countries have experienced rapid fertility decline in recent decades, to roughly two children or fewer, due to the increasing popularity of small families and improved access to family planning services in the region. But Vietnam and other countries will face an aging population and the consequences of an insufficient labour force if it enforces the policy. The world waits as the decision is debated.
