By Xinhua,
Beijing : Chinese authorities are planning to send a medical team to help willing parents in the quake-hit areas to have another child.
The team will perform surgery to reverse sterilisation and provide counselling on having another child to those parents who have lost their children in the quake.
“The team will conduct surgeries in the quake-hit areas on those women wanting to give birth to another child,” Zhang Shikun, director of the science and technology bureau of the National Population and Family Planning Commission, said.
Under China’s “one child” policy, parents who have lost a child or have a disabled child can opt for a second baby.
China’s “one-child” policy, which has been in effect for more than three decades as a planned family policy and then as a law, has prevented an estimated 400 million births. It limits most urban couples to one child and rural couples to two.
The toll in the 8.0-magnitude quake May 12 in the south-western province of Sichuan killed some 70,000 people with more than 17,000 still untraced, the government said.
According to an initial estimate of the Sichuan provincial family planning office, some 7,000 children who were killed in the quake and 16,000 children who were injured were from one-child families.