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.
- Overpopulation of the planet and concentrating resources on one family.
- Emotional/educational/physical neglect of each child
- 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.
- Prevent them conceiving.
- Prevent them giving birth.
- 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.