Big families and the ethical dilemma of restricting family size.

I don’t post in GD very often, so bear with me here.

The American family with 16 children has raised many issues here on the board. I don’t want to touch on their particular situation and beliefs, but rather on the fact that so many people here feel that people shouldn’t be “allowed” to have such large families, even if they can financially support their children without state help.

Now, AFAIK there are several arguments supporting the idea that such large families are wrong.

  1. Overpopulation of the planet and concentrating resources on one family.
  2. Emotional/educational/physical neglect of each child
  3. Sheer “oogyness”- the “it’s a uterus, not a clown car!” argument.

Now, while I agree that it may not be RESPONSIBLE to have an extremely large family, I haven’t seen any compelling argument why the small family ideal justifies the invasion breaches of human rights that enforcing it would entail.

There are only 3 ways you can prevent people from having large families, after all.

  1. Prevent them conceiving.
  2. Prevent them giving birth.
  3. Prevent them raising any child which is born.

Option 1
Enforced sterilisation or contraception, or court orders preventing couples from having sex at all.

Option 2
Forced abortions.

Option 3
Immediate removal of any child over some magical “ideal family size” to foster care or an adoptive family.

Option 1 is a serious breach of religious freedom, privacy and bodily integrity.
Option 2 is morally and ethically repugnant for fairly obvious reasons.
Option 3 “solves” the problem of supposed neglect in large families, but does nothing about overpopulation, and pre-supposes that a child is automatically better off in any small family than in their own large one. Something which has yet to be proven.

So, tell me, if you feel that people shouldn’t be “allowed” to have large families, why? Also please tell me how exactly you would prevent them from doing so, and how you would ethically justify those methods.
Thankyou.

It seems to me that overpopulation is the only rationale that would justify compulsory limits on family size. Who the fuck are YOU to tell China that they can’t regulate their family sizes with their 1 billion plus population? Any nation that has a serious problem with overpopulation, or that can reasonably anticipate one, has a right to institute mandatory controls.

For the other objections, social stigmatizing (shaming) rather than mandatory controls would suffice. People may not have a right to institute legal controls over family size because of their personal opinions, but they damn sure have a right to their personal opinions. And 16 kids … that’s fuckin’ ridiculous.

In my previous post, I was using the generic “YOU” not aiming my comment at Irishgirl, who does not seem to be advocating a position.

You are focusing on strictly physical ways of preventing large families. It might be more prudent for a government focused on limiting family size to provide financial incentives for small family size and/or disincentives for large family size. Use the disincentives from the well-to-do who choose to have large families to strengthen the foster family system, and those who choose large family size but don’t have the financial means to provide for them will have their children moved into the foster system.

Before the usual suspects come in and tell me how mean and callous I am to simply break up families for being poor, let me state that yes, I am mean and callous. In general. This, however, is a purely theoretical exercise expounding no position of right or wrong.

**Evil Captor ** Thanks for clearing that up :slight_smile:

I’m of the opinion that financial incentives to encourage smaller families (like in India) are morally and ethically defensible, while the 3 options I mentioned are not.

But giving incentives to do something is not the same as preventing them from doing something else. Personally I’m ok with the “you want a big family- on your own head be it” and not OK with the “we will step in and prevent you from having a large family”.

I’m seeking opinions from people who DO support some sort of mandatory restriction of family size, and why exactly the evil of large families justifies this action.

So Evil Captor, you feel that China is justified in it’s policies and the methods used to implement them because of the impact of overpopulation on the country. Fair enough, you’re entitled to that opinion.

If human rights are univeral, however, than this means that the human rights of a Chinese woman count less than the human rights of a woman elsewhere, because of the economics and demographics of the country she was born in.
I’m not comfortable with that.

I really don’t think that you’re going to find too many (if any) people here who are going to choose one of your three ways to prevent large families. The reason for this is that I don’t think anyone in the other thread was saying that people shouldn’t be allowed to have large families. I was a pretty active participant in the thread saying that having a huge family wasn’t the best idea. Just because something is a bad idea doesn’t mean that people should be prevented from doing it though.

This is really quite point, as the US population is not (quite) reproducing at replacement levels. If immigration slows, our population would very slowly shrink. In all probability, however, it would begin growing again as people found more room and opportunity again, so might stay relatively stable in the long run.

Omega Glory- I wasn’t actually thinking about any of the posters to the MPSIMS thread.

We have people on this board who have at one time or another advocated:

  1. Enforced sterilisation of “undesirables”-who exactly this group is composed of depending on the personal beliefs of the poster concerned.

  2. Parenting licences (complete with penalty points and disqualifications).

  3. Mandatory reversible birth control that is only removed when the person concerned passes a “fitness to breed test”.

I would imagine some of these people are still around, and I would like to hear their views on the subject.

The most effective way to limit family size is to work for gender equality in the third world. When women aren’t considered property of men and are able to make their own reproductive decisions they tend to voluntarily limit their family size on their own.

Europe, the US and Japan all have birth rates below replacement, the US would have negative population growth if we didn’t have large amounts of immigration. The overpopulation problem can be solved by letting people make their own decisions. Gender equality and economic opportunity are all that we need.

The problem with merely financial disincentives for families larger than some government-decided limit (eliminating deductions for children beyond two, etc.) is the temptation to add further coercion when those disincentives don’t work.

You still have the “problem” of those who say, “I want six children, I can afford to feed them, so I will have them.” That’s often the experience in China, when the financial payments for limiting couples to only one child are often not enough, and the social pressure morphs into straightforward coercion.

The whole problem, at least in many industrialized countries, seems to be almost self-limiting. As the status and position of women rises, they tend to have fewer children. Thus, an alternative to those irishgirl has proposed is to increase educational opportunities for women. Non-coercive, not destructive of the much-vaunted “woman’s right to choose” - a win-win if ever I saw one.

Regards,
Shodan

IMO, if going the financial route, you must not only incentivize low family size, you must also disincentivize large family size. For example, you might say:

Family with <2 children: Each child worth 175% standard deduction.
Family with 3-4 children: Each child worth 100% standard deduction.
Family with >5 children: Caps at 4 standard deductions.

Personally, I don’t believe that population growth in a world of 6 billion and a US of close to 300 million is a good thing. However, my thoughts around incentives and disincentives are purely theoretical, and things would have to get much worse before I might seriously consider voting for someone advocating such views.

I disagree that it’s a serious breach of religious freedom, at least as it’s usually interpreted in the US. Religious freedom generally grants the freedom to believe what you want and to worship how you want, it does not include the right to do whatever you want. If there were a compelling reason to limit the population, religious freedom to have dozens of kids wouldn’t be much of a defense.

That said, there’s no compelling reason to limit the population of the developed world right now, and I don’t see one arising in the near future. As others pointed out, increased prosperity and womens’ rights provide negative feedback to population growth.

I, personally, would have no problem with the government providing financial disincentives to large families. They could start by ending the deduction for having children in the first place.

And add in some public health measures to ensure that fewer children die of disease, so the parents don’t feel the need to have “spare” kids. Fertility and infant mortality are inversely correlated.

Creation of urban job opportunities seems to help, too.

And, of course, ensure that everyone has easy access to contraception and knows what it is and how to use it.

If the government is only letting those with a license to breed have children, it could become a religious issue, as well as a racial issue. Some governments in Germany tried to limit their Jewish populations by requiring government permission for Jews to marry up until the 19th century. How would we ensure that the breeding licenses were handed out in a religion-blind, race-blind manner, and were not used to prevent certain segments of the population from growing more than others?

I keep agreeing with you these days. This is scary. :wink:

Yes, sixteen-child or even six-child families are in no danger of becoming the norm in modern America—not even close. I agree that Americans have a disproportionately large impact on the environment and consumption of resources, so it’s good to keep our overall fertility on the low side. But American women actually choosing to have six or sixteen children are so rare that IMO we can absorb the impacts of their choices without needing to piss all over their civil liberties to discourage them.

On the other hand, we’ve seen data in a recent thread somewhere (can’t find it now, sorry) that wealthy women actually have more children, on average, than poor women, while middle-class women have the lowest fertility rate. (Makes sense, as middle-class parents generally have more expensive plans for child-rearing and better fertility control than poor parents, but lack the resources of rich parents.)

Apparently, the best strategy for keeping overall birthrates low is to have a large middle class and comparatively small strata of the very rich and very poor. But that’s actually the opposite of our current socioeconomic trend in the US, where the middle class is shrinking. So I suppose we could see the “self-limiting” effect diminishing somewhat in the future.

How big a difference would financial (dis-)incentives make on someone who’s determined to have a large family? For instance, to Catholics birth control is a sin. Is saving a little money on their taxes worth damning themselves? And I don’t think someone who subscribes to the “Quiverfull” philosophy is going to be swayed by the money aspect; those people don’t even believe in the rhythm method or natural family planning, I don’t think taxes mean much to them. In short, I don’t think financial penalties would work, especially not when religion is a factor in big family-making (as it almost always is now), and especially not in America, where even if a family is poor, they probably won’t starve to death.

Maybe popularizing studies that show a small family is the best place to raise a child would be the most ethical and effective way of limiting family size. But honestly, I don’t know that large families really are inferior–I’ve known well-adjusted people who came from big families (though not as high as sixteen, I think the largest family out of any acquaintance I’ve had has had seven children) and well-adjusted only children. And I also agree that America is in no danger; even with our share of Quiverfull crazies we’re still under the replacement rate. And I also agree with Shodan (damn!) that the key to stopping overpopulation abroad is better education of women about their choices and more access to contraceptives (even though America’s level of education and access to birth control is somewhat limited too, and we should continue progressing here as well as abroad).

“Come in, my little loves. I’ve got no option but to sell you all for scientific experiments.”

The problem with financial disincentives is that you punish the entire family. Whether it’s added taxes, or simply refusing to raise financial assistance amounts for added children – if the family is ‘wealthy’ it has no impact, and if the family is ‘poor’ you hurt all the children.

Pick a household on welfare, say, mother and two children, and whoever decides these things has determined they need to receive $700 a month to cover food and all other living needs at a low but livable state. Now mom has another baby.

Are you really going to say, ‘Tough’? Are we going to stand back and allow that third child to starve to death while Numbers 1 & 2 are fed?

Not that that would happen, of course. Instead the existing funds would be spread more thinly, possibly to the point that you now have three children who are living in worse conditions.

What exactly has this accomplished? What benefit to ‘society’ can be created that offsets the damage this will do?

I’m going to toss in another consideration for this discussion, one based on currently acknowledged (in the Western world, anyway) precepts of medical ethics. If we are to limit family size, aside from the fiscal methodologies proposed in some posts in this thread, we are left with no options other than enforced procreative patterns. This could be in the form of state mandated sterilization, abortion, infanticide, etc. all of which involve subjugation of individual rights (as alluded to above, in medical ethical precepts, Autonomy) for the greater good. Our society already endorses this concept in the public health arena - for example, although we defend individual privacy in many medical circumstances, we mandate that persons with certain diseases (HIV for example) must be identified to local health departments, and there is a mandatory notification of their sexual partners that they have been in contact with someone who is known to be HIV positive (although the contact is not given the name of the person who has turned up HIV positive.) In this example, individual right to privacy is superceded by the greater good of society, that is, preventing the spread of a deadly public health menace. So, Autonomy, or in the situation just described, the ability of an individual to make decisions that only involve themselves, i.e. keeping their HIV positive status unknown, is trumped by a greater ethical foundation (keeping society healthy).

Decisions of family size and other choices about procreation fall into this category of Autonomy. How dare we interfere with a person’s fundamental right to decide when or how often they should bear children. The only ethically defensible reason to interfere with this autonomy (choice of how many children to have) is one that demonstrates that the greater good of society supercedes that fundamental right to choosing family size. What are the costs to our society that are incurred when people choose to have large families? In some cases there are none, but in others the cost to society may be significant. The children of large families may burden local school systems and local health systems. Are all children born into large families dysfunctional or unhealthy; absolutely not, but when they are, there are more of them, and not all large families have the financial means to meet the needs of their families. As a society, we can pay now or we can pay later - the bottom line is that in these situations of need, society must pay, and the more children from a single family that does not contribute more to the tax base, the more cost to society. So, even in our resource rich country, one could argue that the greater societal good supercedes individual family’s rights to choosing how many kids to bring into this world. We all know that we can’t demand that parents provide evidence before they procreate that they will be able to provide for the financial and emotional wellbeing of the human beings they bring into this world. And, because the world is unpredictable, even if a family starts out capable of supporting umpteen children, will they be able to do so until all of those children are wage earning independent adults, not requiring public assistance?

So, to summarize a long post; seems to me that there is solid footing, from an ethical foundation, to limit family size when the greater good is achieved by said limitation. The problem, though, is what constitutes reasonable and ethically defensible family size limitation…

If you can’t afford them, don’t have them.