China announced Thursday that it was ending a governmental policy in which families could legally have only one child, adding it was now upping that number to two. <br /><br />The policy, in force for the past three decades, was implemented in a bid to curb the country's overpopulation.<br /><br />The policy was first eased in mid-2014, when authorities allowed families whose spouses were only children to have two offspring if they chose to. Now that policy has been expanded to all Chinese families.<br /><br />In its early years, the policy was brutally enforced by Chinese authorities, with violators sentenced to harsh jail terms for “harming the public welfare.”<br /><br />In addition, rumors abounded that parents who were limited to one child would abandon female babies, preferring to have a boy, if they could only have one.
