China will be able to handle an estimated wave of 20 million newborns following its recent loosening of its family planning policies to allow a couple to have two children, a senior health official said on Wednesday.
Yang Wenzhuang, a deputy-director at the National Health and Family Planning Commission, said in an interview with China National Radio (CNR) that the commission predicted that there will be more than 20 million new babies born during the peak year after the implementation of the two-child policy.
About 23 million newborns are expected in 2017, Lu Jiehua, a sociology professor with Peking University, told the Beijing Times.
"The increase in birth rates is predictable and can be dealt with. Our present job is to promote the policy and guide people to make sensible birth plans," Yang said, adding that there will not be a baby boom in 2016.
China announced on October 29 that it will allow all couples to have a second baby.
Currently, there are more than 90 million couples in China who are candidates for the two-child policy. Some 60 percent of women of childbearing age are more than 35 years old, Yang said.
Jiang Weiping, director of the China Population and Development Research Center, told the Global Times that the two-child policy needs to go through the national legislature first, and then each province and region will amend their rules according to the national law. "I think the whole process can be completed within one year," Jiang predicted.
To cope with the birth increase, Yang said that the government will devote more to improve hospitals' ability to accommodate a surge in pregnancies.
In 2013, China began to allow couples to have a second baby if one of the couples was single child. Some people think the policy led to fewer births than the government had hoped for, but Yang told CNR that the birth rate increased steadily due to the policy change, adding that by the end of September, 1.76 million couples applied for a second baby.
