Check Your Values; Is There A Right To Many Children?

“Maintaining a civil society depends on a general acceptance of certain human rights and a collective (governmental) suppression of practices that interfere with those rights.”

A “discussion of rights and ethics is good in itself and having a few generally accepted principles for sharing this planet with other people and other living beings helps guide policy.

All rights, regardless of their putative origins, clearly have attached responsibilities and limitations where they impinge on other people’s’ rights

In order to suppress such activities, people form governments, and governments prohibit various actions because they interfere with one of the main functions of government – maintaining peace and order.  Since overpopulation is now a major threat to both, indeed to the persistence of civilization,[3] regulating the size of their populations is clearly a central duty of all national governments.

The risk of collapse is much too close to condemn the notion of population limitation, which is essential for the preservation of civilization, or to pussy-foot around it with euphemisms like “family planning.” People shouldn’t have the right to have as many children as they want just because they can plan the timing of their births.  Responsible reproduction is not just about supporting one’s offspring – it’s also about considering the world in which they and future generations will try to live, and that means carefully limiting their numbers.

We also need to redesign our economic system so that it doesn’t depend on growth; we need to begin now to shift society’s ambitions in a more sustainable direction. We surely don’t want to count on the inevitable resource wars (nuclear or conventional), refugee tragedies, pandemics, poisoning and starvation to achieve alignment between population and resources”

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