Families that violate the rule where it is most strictly enforced face mandatory abortions and severe financial penalties, while single-child couples throughout the country are entitled to better child care, preferential housing assignments, and cash bonuses.
The policy has generally worked, and fertility rates have fallen to an average of about two children per woman, down from more than five children per woman in the 1950s. However, the number of Chinese women having children today is still much greater than were having children in the previous generation, so China's population growth continues.
India's population has more than doubled since its family-planning policy went into effect in the 1950s, and current projections predict that India will overtake China's position as most populous nation by 2050. However, India's total fertility rate has declined by more than 40 percent since the 1960s, and today the average number of children per woman is around three.
The country's most recent approach to population issues focuses on the advancement of women economically, academically, and socially, as independent women are more likely to have small families. Indian public information campaigns are also working to counter favoritism for boys, a deeply ingrained tradition that drives couples to have more children.
Modern campaigns are a change from the darker days of India's population policy. In the 1970s, the government declared a population "state of emergency," began implementing forced sterilizations in the nation's poorest regions, and even rewarded medical workers who performed the most operations. The national focus on sterilization hindered women's acceptance of family planning, as many considered birth control an all-or-nothing proposition and chose to forgo it entirely.
Today, India's population policy focuses on a number of issues, including advocating child spacing, informing women and men about the range and availability of contraceptive methods, promoting small family size, and presenting sterilization in a more humane light.
Kenya was the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to view runaway population growth as a serious impediment to economic prosperity, and it became the first, in the late 1960s, to begin developing a national family-planning campaign.
The country's official population policy calls for matching population size with available resources, yet leaves decisions on family size up to individual families. While the Kenyan government formulates official strategies on family planning, promotion of the message and means of family planning falls mainly to local health-care offices and nongovernmental organizations.
By all accounts, the country's approach has been successful. The average number of children per woman has dropped to around four from around eight in the 1980s, which constitutes one of the fastest-ever national declines in family size. Contraceptive use has grown from seven percent in 1978 to over 30 percent today. AIDS, which affects one in ten Kenyan adults, is a significant factor in both higher contraceptive use and the lower fertility rate.
Kenya's population ads target both men and women, and tend to frame the need for family planning around the self-evident realities of population growth such as overuse of land and scarcity of jobs. The campaigns also aim to demystify contraceptive methods and provide assurance of their safety and utility, especially in rural areas, where suspicion and misunderstanding are common.
