Why should your progeny have a greater right to exist that anyone else's. We really need to modify the tax code to dissuade people from having for than 2 children. I would, however, be willing to create exceptions for people who had more than two children, because their second naturally induced pregnancy resulted in twins.

If Porritt is so concerned about the birthrate, maybe he should start trying to figure out how to improve the educational and economic opportunities for the poorest women in his country.

Amen and hallelujah!

Of course that would involve improving the economic and social standing of strange, immigrant women — inscrutable, out-of-control baby-making machines, every one. No doubt that's taking the pro-life thing further than these people signed up for. But you know... keep on reaching, guys!

Personally, I'm agnostic on the idea of enforced population control. It seems that countries do it when they have to, and not before. China in particular is in a situation utterly unlike what any other country faces — a nation the size of the US but with four times the population and a small fraction of the arable land.

It will take a long time before the US is ever even close to being in that situation, so on the one hand why fuss about it so much?

But on the other hand, even if the world's population today is sparse compared to what we could, in theory, feed and care for, the long-term trend is unsustainable either way. It was probably unsustainable a few billion people ago. The solution is going to require something quite a bit more radical than just slowing population growth.

In that sense the NPG people, and even the VHE project, are worth paying attention to — they get the scale of the population problem and understand how far outside the box we need to be thinking to deal with it.

Their real problem is that people have been predicting the imminent collapse of civilization due to population pressure for two hundred years now, and every time they do it discredits the valid underlying concerns that motivate them.

A better way to think about it might be to consider that what we have today is the latitude to make modestly inconvenient decisions about our collective future — but if we put it off a day will come when we do run out of easy options, and the only alternatives will make us all nostalgic for China's current draconian policies.

Calling a single person irresponsible for having more children is silly. What I think is even sillier is this: there are a lot of people who have kids because they're expected to, not because they want them. Women and men both who have kids because they feel they have no other choice. Who have two because friends and family told them that one was going to end up spoiled.

Very few people in this world want families of four kids, much less fourteen. A lot of people would be content with none if there wasn't so much social pressure. I strongly suspect that if everybody was left to what their real desire was--and if, worldwide, people didn't have to have kids just to assure they could retire someday or keep the farm going or whatever--then we'd tend to gravitate back to a very reasonable number overall.

I'm leaning towards my magic number being three, although we've also talked about adoption and foster care and so on, so I have no idea how many of those will be biological. At the same time, I have quite a lot of friends who don't want kids at all. If I limit myself and they all get pressured into kids they don't want, we're all unhappy. Now, if we remove all birth control barriers, improve elder care for those without children to watch over them, etc, and we still see population increasing unsustainably, then I'd be more than willing to sacrifice for the good of mankind, but I'm not all that confident that it would be necessary.

Why is preventing some lives from ever taking place preferable to ending some lives early?

If Porritt is so concerned about the birthrate, maybe he should start trying to figure out how to improve the educational and economic opportunities for the poorest women in his country.

Indeed. As far as I know, this is the best way to curb down the natality graph (with the exception of total war). Any laws trying to legislate on how many children people have will eventually have the opposite effect. So I support Ms Mieszkowski's suggestion (with one little difference: I'd improve the educational and economic opportunites for the poorest men, too.)

no, population control will not make problems solve themselves, but having a rapidly growing population makes any solutions much more costly and difficult and, most importantly, or at least most permanently, more of the natural world will be permanently lost.

Why should an advisor on environmental policy be obligated to address social issues before making basic, commonsense declarations about the relationship between environmental policy and family planning? Large families simply _are_ burdensome, and I can't see why someone whose job it is to think about longterm solutions shouldn't be allowed to address this.

Yes, lack of educational opportunity and economic inequity lead to larger families, and yes, any sensible overarching policy on longterm sustainability will realize this. But this doesn't mean that only the poor and uneducated have large families, and moreover, part of the education process itself is people like Porritt making statements like this. So good on him, sticking his neck out on an obviously contentious issue to say what needs to be said.

How does it raise the specter of a Chinese-style one-child policy to suggest that prospective parents should think about these issues and maybe choose to have a reasonable number of children? I see nothing in Porritt's statements to suggest he's talking about anything but voluntary control on family size.

Funny, friends and I were just batting around the notion of a 2 child family ideal, given the state of our planet and world economy. That said, no one in the group is in favor of such a legislated restriction on one's personal rights.

With regard to the United Kingdom, Jonathon Porritt might want to consider his country's policies. Where an unemployed pregnant woman/teenager qualifies for free housing (council-house or flat) with greater income on the dole/welfare than from a minimum wage-type job, the incentive is for more children, not fewer. It's appalling to see in the North of England the number of teenagers pushing prams. (England does not permit infants to be adopted out of the country, even to British nationals, but that's another issue). Before charging people (read: women) with being irresponsible for bearing more than two children, Mr. Porritt would do well to advise his government on the implementation of better incentives in the forms of education and employment to reduce early and undesired pregnancies, as well as - with the assistance of childcare - mandate education leading toward a job for recipients of subsidized housing.