Visit your parents, or else!

China has passed a rather unusual law recently concerning the treatment of it's elderly requiring young people to visit their parents "often". It doesn't seem to quantify just what "often" is but they also granted the elderly a new avenue for redress by allowing them to sue their children for neglect. Since what constitutes "often" was left deliberately vague the only way to avoid running afoul of the is to truly visit one's parents...well...often! 

It might seem odd that such a militaristic police state should be concerned with such mundane issues like elder care but there is an important self serving aspect of the government action here.For over fifty years China has had in place a strict one child per couple policy which was achieved through birth control, sterilization and, when that failed, mandatory or even forced abortions. This policy had the desired effect in the short term of slowing the explosive growth in the Chinese population. But moral abomination such as this policy often yields what is perceived as a short term benefit while the consequences, while they may be slow in coming, are far more destructive than what was posed by the original problem. We are just seeing the tip of the iceberg of consequences that China is running up against now as many, many people will enter old age with no children to care for them and a government totally unprepared to take up the slack. The lesson should not be lost on us. A culture of death cannot survive for very long without suffering the consequences of its morally outrageous behavior.