A comparative view of family policy

• China's one child policy: the government's control policy has aimed to discourage couples from having more than one child. The policy is supervised by workplace family planning committees; women must seek their permission to try to become pregnant, and there is often a waiting list and a quota for each factory.
• China's one child policy: couples who comply get extra benefits, such as free healthcare and higher tax allowances. An only child will get priority in education and housing later in life. Couples who break their agreement to have only one child must repay the allowances and pay a fine. Women face pressure to undergo sterilisation after their first child.
• Communist Romania: the former communist government in the 1980s introduced a series of policies to try to drive up the birth rate, which had been falling as living standards declined.
• Communist Romania: restricted contraception and abortion, set up infertility treatment centres, made divorce more difficult, lowered the legal age of marriage to 15, and made unmarried adults and childless couples pay an extra 5% income tax.
• Nazi family policy: in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the state pursued a twofold policy. It encouraged the healthy and supposedly 'racially pure' to breed a 'master race'.
• Nazi family policy: Official policy sought to keep women out of the workforce and confine them to 'children, kitchen and church, the better to perform their biological role.
• Nazi family policy: The state compulsory sterilised 375,000 disabled people that it deemed unfit to breed on grounds of 'physical malformation', mental retardation, epilepsy, imbecility, deafness or blindness. Many of these people were later murdered in Nazi concentration camps.
• Democratic societies: Democratic societies, e.g. Britain, the family is a private sphere of life in which the government does not intervene, except perhaps when things 'go wrong', e.g. in cases of child abuse.
• Democratic societies: however, sociologists argue that in fact, even in democratic societies, the state's social policies play a very important role in shaping family life.