A family make their way along a road at a park in Beijingn (Photo: AFP)
China's top legislative committee formally approved a loosening of the one-child policy on Saturday, according to state media. Here are some key facts about the controversial law.
Q: Why was the one-child policy enacted?
China's family planning law, which limits many couples to having one child only, was formally implemented in the late 1970s as a means of controlling its population, the world's largest.
Authorities say that avoiding overpopulation has helped speed China's rapid economic development since then.
They also argue that the policy has prevented about 400 million births, keeping the nation's population at roughly 1.35 billion.
Q: How is it carried out?
The policy was long enforced by China's family planning commission, now merged with the health ministry, whose hundreds of thousands of personnel rely on permits, fines and, in some cases, forced sterilisation and late-term abortions.
Critics argue that implementation of the policy has been uneven, with some localities offering officials incentives to control births, and other areas dependent on fines levied for violations.
Forced abortions remain widespread, according to rights groups, especially for unmarried women or for couples under the legal marrying age of 22 for men and 20 for women.
Q: What are the pressures that have contributed toward the decision to ease controls?
Worries about the decline of China's working-age population, combined with an increasing elderly population, have caused authorities to gradually relax the law.
China's working-age population fell by about 3.45 million to 937 million in 2012, while the country's 194 million elderly citizens now make up 14.3 percent of the population, a nearly three-fold increase from 1982.
Sex-selective abortions, combined with an ingrained social preference for sons, have led to a heavy imbalance in the number of newborn boys and girls, with males outnumbering females approximately six to five.
Under the new reform, couples will be allowed to have two children if one of the parents is an only child.
Before that, under a previous reform, both parents had to be only children to have a second baby. Others exempted include ethnic minorities and farmers whose first child is a girl.
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