China is planning is eliminate its child limitation mandate for families – a major reversal of a policy that has been in place for four decades.

The communist country's State Council intends to end the two-child limit nationwide and has ordered research on the effects of its decision, Bloomberg reported , citing government officials who asked to remain anonymous.

The officials said China wants to slow the pace of aging in the country and reconcile its shortage of workers. Its restrictive child policy has also been the source of international criticism on human rights .

Under the new policy, called "independent fertility," families would be able to decide for themselves how many children to have. A final decision could come in the next few months but may be delayed until 2019, the officials told Bloomberg.

"It's late for China to remove birth limits even within this year but it's better than never," Chen Jian, a vice president of the China Society of Economic Reform, told Bloomberg.

China enacted a one-child policy in 1979 but relaxed it to two children in 2016. The restrictions left the country with an aging population and not enough people to care for them. The population is also more heavily male, with 106 men for every 100 women .

Despite relaxing the one-child policy, births in China fell 3.5 percent to 17.2 million nationwide last year, Bloomberg reported. And experts aren't hopeful the country's independent fertility plan will increase the birth rate due to the repercussions the birth limit has had on society.

"The policy shift will hardly boost the number of newborns in China," Huang Wenzheng, a senior researcher at the Beijing-based think tank Center for China and Globalization, told Bloomberg. "China's number of births will continue to drop dramatically, considering a sharp decrease in the number of fertile women and declining fertility willingness."