Chinese vs. American Reproductive Policies

Much ado has ben made of China's One Child policy. The BBC AND NY Times have both run tearjerker page one stories about Chinese parents who have lost a child, the only child they will ever have (particularly in the case where the parents are now too old to reproduce--all the more dramatic). A tertiary effect of the One Child policy might be a lack of parentless children for begrieved Chinese parents to adopt. Recall that China recently tightened up its policies regarding foreign adoption of Chinese babies, banning gays and other demos proclaimed undesirable by Beijing following a boom in American adoption of Chinese babies in recent decades).

Add it all up and you have the perfect ingredients for tear soup as mentioned above and yet more damning evidence of the outrageous inhumanity og the barbaric Chinese system of government.

Then you rememer the Katrina debacle. President Bush wrote off the population of an entire American major metropolitan area and has been whistling Dixie ever since.

And if the Chinese quake had hit, say, Cape Girardeau, MO, which is a small town in southwest Missouri built on a fault line potentially more deadly than the San Andreas fault. If it had happened in the Cape, as lokes call it, parents may well have lost an entire brood of children in one fell swoop. Given the same circumstances, kids there would have been in school at that time of day, and Cape's infrastructre and building codes might conceivably be destroyed by a quake of the same magnitude.

When it comes to formulating a differential equation to gauge the suffering of the Chinese parents who lost children in the quake, you have to turn Kant on his head and rock an inverse categorical imperative. The question becomes, which is the worst for the greatest number--the Chinese One Child Policy or the Amercan Crunch All You Want We'll Make More attitude?