My mum told me that the afternoon in 1989 when I was born, I could have had a sibling, who came to this world on the same day but didn't share a womb with me. Actually, the baby was born to a family of poor farmers. Around the corner of a ward the couple asked my dad if he could take in their newborn, whom they couldn't keep. It was their second child, and unfortunately for them, a girl. They were unable to afford the tremendous fine they were facing due to a rigidly-enforced one-child policy.

Too young and frightened to deal with an unexpected imploration like this, my parents refused immediately. "I should have taken her," she told me 25 years later, trying to recall the beautiful face with flushed cheeks, "for the girl's good." "But there was nothing we could do, because we worked in a State-owned company, and just had you, and you only."

The girl's birth was a microcosm of what this generation of Chinese has gone through. Her destiny was determined before she was given a choice. Similar cases have haunted the nation since the one-child policy was introduced three decades ago.

As the country finally decided to relax this controversial policy in a bid to reverse the increasingly imbalanced demographic structure and labor force, I noticed an editorial in your newspaper, saying the lifting of the one-child policy "echoes people's will."

I agree, although it will take huge effort to reverse the policy that has affected hundreds of millions of families. It was a hard choice when the country was unable to feed a burdening population, and instead launched a policy whose side effects could be hardly predicted back then.

I am not so sure, as the editorial says, that "only time can give it an objective judgment." Perhaps objective judgment will never come. On the one hand, demographic findings and analyses may be convincing in the short term, but long-term speculation is always easy to trigger debates. On the other hand, for millions of families which have been deeply affected by the policy, it is truly impossible to rationally judge the policy as good or bad.

From the one-child policy to two-child policy, the leaf cannot be simply turned over. There are families, whose numbers go unseen in official reports, still suffering from the side effects of the one-child policy. For instance, some lost their only kid long after they were too old to have another, and ended up living the rest of their lives alone.

When we are advised to look at the big picture and explore the prospects of a new family planning policy, we should keep reminding ourselves to look back to and do something for those individuals, who have sacrificed so much.

Aaron Liu, a newspaper reporter based in Beijing