Sterilization, Oral Contraception, and Population Control in China.

This article focuses on sterilization, oral contraception, and population control in China. In the early spring of 1962 China resumed public discussions and propaganda in favour of late marriage. Events since then have made it abundantly clear that this open advocacy of marriage postponement constituted but a prologue to a new phase of fertility control activities. This bland re-opening of the birth control issue may well have been due to domestic considerations. In any case, the recent promotion of late marriage was initially not explicitly linked to the question of fertility control; its keynote was: "it is not good to get married and give birth to a child too early in life." Thus, the recent campaign to encourage late marriage with its accompanying emphasis upon personal well-being and the welfare of mothers and children may have been deliberately tactful. It reiterated the official position on the need for birth control, and simultaneously and simply laid the basis for the re-activation of the fertility control activities that were to come shortly.