In China, one-child policy compounds loss of child for parents But for the loneliness that will haunt him and his wife the rest of their lives, Xublames the Chinese government. China told the couple they could only have one child and threatened to take away everything if they didn't listen. They were good citizens, he said, "so for 20 years, we put our whole future and hope into our son." Now, they have no one to support them in old age. But even more crushing, said Xu, 53, they have nothing to live for. For more than three decades, debate has raged over China's one-child policy, imposed in 1979 to rein in runaway population growth. It has reshaped Chinese society - with birthrates plunging from 4.77 children per woman in the early 1970s to 1.64 in 2011, according to United Nations estimates - and created the world's most imbalanced gender ratio, with baby boys far outnumbering girls. Human rights groups have exposed forced abortions, infanticide and involuntary sterilizations, practices banned in theory by the government. And officials are increasingly deliberating whether the long-term economic costs of the policy - including a looming labor shortage - now outweigh the benefits. In the latest sign of such concern, the government announced last weekend that it is studying possible ways to relax the one-child policy in coming years, according to state media. Little discussed and largely ignored, however, is a quiet devastation left in the policy's wake: childless parents. A parent's worst nightmare in any country, the deaths of children in China are even more painful because of the cultural importance of descendents, increasing financial pressures on the elderly and the legal limits on bearing additional offspring. Few reliable numbers exist on such grieving parents. But one study at the state-run Chinese Academy of Social Science estimated that there are already more than 1 million parents who lost their only child, a number expected to rise rapidly. Many such parents are too old to conceive again, and some say they regret not pushing for a second child when they could have, even if it would have meant losing their jobs and getting hit with overwhelming fines. In quiet and often tearful interviews, more than 30 parents who lost children described lives of emptiness and a depression so deep that some thought about suicide. Almost all characterized their child's death as a crippling financial blow because of how strongly China's elderly tend to depend on their children to supplement modest government pensions. Many noted bitterly the enormous resources the government has plowed into one-child enforcement, creating an entire new wing of bureaucracy down to the township level. The policy has limited exceptions for rural and ethnic groups. The government collects steep fines from offenders, each year estimated to be in the billions, although the precise amount is kept secret. And yet, the parents complain, it wasn't until 2007 that China began to disburse small sums as compensation to families whose only child had died.