The loss of so many children in the May 12 earthquake -- estimates range from 5,500 to 10,000 or more -- has prompted the Chinese government to announce a new exception to its "one-child" family planning policy. Applied mainly among urban couples, the three-decade-old "one-child" regulation has meant that many parents who lost sons and daughters in the quake became childless overnight.

(Rural Chinese families typically are allowed to have two kids if the first-born is a daughter, and families of non-Han Chinese ethnic origin are allowed two ore more kids. Therefore larger families are not uncommon among families of the Tibetan and Qiang ethnic minority group -- of which there are many near the quake epicenter, which took place in the Aba Autonomous Tibetan and Qiang Prefecture.)

Now, urban couples whose single children died young are being told that each can get a certificate allowing a second birth.  Of course, this policy relaxation won't bring back loved ones who are lost forever. But the idea could help comfort some distraught parents in Sichuan -- and dull growing grassroots anger over shoddy construction standards that apparently allowed so many schools to come tumbling down, during peak classroom hours no less.

Visiting  the ruins of the devastated Juyuan School in Dujiangyan recently, I saw a number of parents haranguing a government delegation about the so-called doufucha gongcheng or "bean-curd engineering" (meaning substandard building) of the collapsed school. The disturbance ultimately escalated into an emotional grassroots riot.

The quake could also create an increase in the numbers of Chinese couples looking to adopt kids and orphans available for adoption. Here is my colleague Manuela's interview with Robert Glover, head of Care for Children which  runs 180 orphanages throughout China, including nine child welfare institutions in the quake zone.

Here's an update on children of the quake: Chinese authorities revealed that thousands of kids and parents separated by the disaster have been reunited by social workers. More than 7,000 in fact.  That came from Ye Lu, director of social welfare at the provincial Civil Affairs Department. He also said "a little more than 1000 children remained unclaimed or orphaned," and that authorities have been flooded with calls from Chinese parents seeking to adopt quake orphans. “We’re still getting thousands of calls per week asking about how to adopt, but we are still hoping to find the parents of these 1,000 kids," he said.