Papua New Guinea weighs three-child family policy

Papua New Guinea is considering ways to limit families to three children to stop population growth from overwhelming public services, Prime Minister James Marape said.

Marape said Monday that the proposed policy would aim to prevent unplanned pregnancies and births and encourage families to have no more than three children. He said it would help “curtail uncontrolled demographic expansion”.

It was not immediately clear what the family planning policy would involve.

Papua New Guinea has an official population of about 10 million people, but some analysts say the figure could be much higher because of the difficulty of counting people across dense forests and rugged hills.

The government statistics office has estimated average yearly population growth at 2.6 percent. The National Research Institute of Papua New Guinea says recent growth is about three percent.