CHINA

It appears that China is concerned about its ageing population and now considers scrapping its one-child-per-family policy – but not completely abandoning its family-planning policies.

Having the world’s biggest population straining scarce land, water and energy resources, China enforced rules to restrict family size since the 1970s. The rule of limiting families to one child in urban areas and two children in the countryside, has prevented several hundred million births and increased prosperity.

SINGLE MOTHERS are frowned upon. Your personal choices as a woman are monitored and supervised by many - expecting you to do as everyone else does. But one single mother who refused to marry the father of her baby or have an abortion, decided to go it alone. In a country that strictly controls population, she was regarded as an outcast. For the sake of giving her son the basic identification he would need to attend school and to receive social services, she married a much older man and though she now finds herself in an abusive relationship, she says it is worth it and has no regrets. She commented that "most women in this situation would have given away their child to others for adoption as no one would chose to bring up the child on their own."

Even though official statistics on the number of single mothers is unavailable, experts believe the numbers are rising fast.