Setting a limit on # of kids

[MercuryJones]

^

Well... do you have a better solution regarding our current population limiting our unrestrained use of resources?

 

[bankside]

In what way would it be "easy" to tell people how many children they can have AND THEN enforce it? Increasing production of food would NOT be easier than THAT?

Karen, it's simple. I'd rather vote for the secret police to throw people in jail or forcibly sterilize them if they've already had 4 kids and they're trying for 6, when the alternative is, for example, to watch the tiger go extinct so their surplus kids can be fed with crops grown on the last of the tiger's natural habitat. The tiger and the last of their habitat is way more important to me than the "right" to have families that large. I don't really care how much of a personal burden it is for those individuals to be prevented from having a family that large.

So, that's my bottom-line fallback position. Of course I'm very happy if there are other solutions. Show me that a million square kilometres of the Sahara can be irrigated without fucking over the rest of the desert ecosystem, without destroying the water source with industrial-scale desalinization, etc., and show me the families that are willing to pay for that kind of geo-engineering, and then they will have food for their extra kids.

But you'd have to grow a forest there too, to get the lumber for the kids those houses will eventually need, because we're not going to be able to cut down all the trees in the forests of Canada & Brazil just so they can have extra kids. It is far from a done deal.

 

[frankfrank]

I have been assured that a well nourished, healthy child at only one year makes for a tender, delicious roast. Of course a stew or ragout might stretch the meal a bit longer, and so should be encouraged.

Ah yes, the cannibal Christmas song, SILENT NIGHT:

"...Holy infant, so tender and mild..."

 

[The_Reaper]

Unless technology does something to help out our resources, and the impact of human existence on our planet, I'd have to go with restricting the number of children.

There's numerous books on this subject, and all of them seem to agree that our planet cannot support some of the population projections that the future could bring. We don't have the resources, and the impact of more and more human beings could only have further environmental consequences on the planet; which could of course lead to the planet becoming uninhabitable.

Fear-mongering, perhaps, but it's also a worthy point to consider.

I think the problem is when a culture begins to develop around the child policy; like China's attitude of preferring male children over female. And I think when you talk about child limits, people immediately imagine that children of whichever gender their parents didn't want, will now be in risk of abandonment or death, simply because the parents will want to try again.

As such, I think a one-child policy might not be the greatest idea; and would rather see a cap around 2, with perhaps a special dispensation for a 3rd child if both children already born are of the same gender...

There I go, sounding like a bureaucrat already...

 

[bulge]

Breeders need a good kick in the nuts for overpopulating and overpolluting the planet.

http://kramtoad.com/