India, Dec. 4 -- China's demographic desperation underlines its decision to tax birth control products. Its new VAT regime withdraws the exemption granted three decades ago to contraceptives and removes the tax on childcare and marriage services. Over the past few years, the Chinese State has been scrambling to undo the disastrous effects of its one-child policy, adopted in 1979 and junked in 2015 (capping the number of children per couple was entirely done away with only in 2021). Thanks to a raft of coercive measures such as fines, registration limits, etc, the country's birth rate spiralled downwards quickly, reaching 6.77 births per 1,000 population in 2024 from 17.8 in 1979. The total fertility rate, at one child per woman, is now less than half of the replacement rate (2.1). The signs for the country's demographic future are, predictably, ominous - not enough working hands and a swelling number of elderly dependents. But can costlier contraception and cheaper support services push procreation and avoid the oncoming demographic crisis? Three things are important to note here. First, State intervention has yet to demonstrate success in reversing demographic decline - South Korea, Japan, and a few European countries have rolled out incentives for having children, but fertility and crude birth rates have stayed stubbornly low. Two, condoms - one of the most easily available contraceptives - play a key role in controlling the spread of sexually transmitted infections (STIs). So, making these costlier could have an unintended health care fallout. Three, it is odd that people unable to afford birth control are expected to be able to afford having children and bringing them up, even with cheaper care services and State support. Many factors - including personal economic, familial and social contexts, apprehensions about the future, and individual emotional capacities - influence the decision to have children. Whether China manages to reverse its demographic course or not, its desperation should be instructive for those who buy the Malthusian logic of population control....