China is ending a decades-long tax exemption on contraceptives to push up its birth rate. Experts say the change could leave women and young people more vulnerable.
Archived version: https://archive.is/newest/https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-12-04/china-add-tax-on-condoms-and-contraceptives-to-boost-birth-rate/106097254
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Economically stable people who feel safe in their society choose to have children.
China has not been sharing youth unemployment numbers for a year now, after they started approaching 20% unemployment for the 18-30 age range.
Chinese women should just refuse to have sex with men.
Women could change the world overnight if they’d ban together on denying sex. There were two warring tribes in Africa (last century, I forget) where the woman came together and said no poonanny until you boys are at peace. Instant peace.
Sure, wealthy people can easily prevent pregnancy while poor peoply have higher risk of having unwanted pregnancy. Sounds extremely smart and well thought through…
Welcome to China!
Read the article. All they’re doing is getting rid of a tax exemption. The tax exemption existed because previous government policy was to reduce birthrates. Now that government policy is to increase birthrates, that exception was removed. They aren’t increasing costs by 5x or anything.
Make a livable world and people will want to live in it.
Too bad that that’s not profitable in the short term. It used to be just less profitable than exploitation, but it was ignored long enough that it’s now unprofitable, because we ruined everything so much that we need to invest into fixing it first.
sodomy is still free though yeah?
I don’t know how much they plan to increase the cost of a condom, but I’d wager that it will be cheaper than 18 years of expenses.
The US birth rate and china’s birth rate are shockingly similar. I love how we point to their one child policy for their issues while ignoring what both populations are saying. Turns out run away capitalism is too blame. The one child policy doesn’t explain why both populations millennials and gen xers are not interested in even having relationships, let alone having children. Both sets say the same things. Not enough money, too much work, worries about climate, and fear of world conflicts. Both China and US people need to realize both our governments are more likely to role back women’s rights to increase birth rates opposed to emancipating their people.
36 years of government policy with harsh penalties for having more than one child doesn’t disappear quickly (1979-2015). They’ve trained two generations not to have kids, and the looming global climate disaster affects everyone worldwide. And while I haven’t looked into it, I think it’s a safe bet that in large Chinese cities the cost of living has also outpaced wages, like in nearly every other major city in the world. None of that is conducive to wanting to have kids.
Capitalisms only solution to problems is to continue the beating until morale improves, as long as it’s deemed the most profitable.
Literally no government is actually trying to improve the quality of life of its people in any tangible way that addresses the reasons they choose to not bring a child into this world.
