by JivinJ, host of the blog, JivinJehoshaphat

• Here’s an article in the China Post about the rising trend in Taiwan for married couples to abort their first child. Taiwan’s total fertility rate in 2010 was 0.895.
• A ballot proposal to legalize abortion in Liechtenstein failed:

  Opponents won the referendum with a majority of 514 votes, out of 11,510 ballots cast. The official count put no-votes at 52.3 percent, ahead of 47.7 percent who favored the plan to decriminalize abortion in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy or if the child is severely disabled.

• In the Weekly Standard, Jonathan Last writes about China’s one-child policy and its supporters: 

  It’s hard to know what’s at the root of all this admiration. Part of it may be a reaction to the gauche American habit of having children. Push environmentalists hard enough and eventually they devolve into overpopulation hysterics. Or perhaps appreciating One-Child is, like following professional soccer, just a way of peacocking moral superiority.

  But the more charitable (and likely) explanation is that people who claim to admire China’s One-Child policy simply don’t know very much about it. Like where it came from. Or how it actually works. Or what it has really done to China’s demographics. Joe Biden [pictured above left] may not be willing to second guess One-Child, but many Chinese demographers are doing just that because they are terrified by what it has done to their country. The people who care most about One-Child—the Chinese—spend a lot of time these days not praising the policy but trying to figure a way out of it. Because it turns out that One-Child wasn’t so much a policy as a trap.

  At the end, Last discusses how years of China’s one-child policy may have so dramatically changed how the Chinese view children that even if it was rescinded, it wouldn’t matter.

• The local DC FOX affiliate has an interview/debate on Virginia’s new abortion regulations between Chris Freund, VP of The Family Foundation, and Tarina Keene, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice America:

[Photo via IBTimes.com]