How would the world change if people could only have two children?

Great Debates
1

Just a thought experiment that came to me in the middle of a night: How would the world change if people could never have more than two children each?

Rules: This applies on the individual level, to both men and women. Each baby ‘counts’ against each of its biological parents allotments.

A baby ‘counts’ as soon as it has drawn a single breath. As in, if a pregnancy fails/is aborted – anywhere along the line, by a zygote not implanting or a third trimester abortion – it doesn’t count. OTOH, even if a baby then dies in just a few minutes after birth, that ticket has been punched.

A first pregnancy might result in twins, but no triplets/quads/etc would happen, and second children are always singles.

No technological ‘cheats.’ Even if human cloning gets developed, the resulting baby has to fit within the genetic donor(s)’ allotment. (So I guess if you were to clone your second child you could actually have three children, but then that second child him/herself could only have one more child in the future.)

Basically, once you have had your second child, your sperm/ova no longer work. This includes any that you might have stored away. It also causes the immediate death of any unborn ‘extra’ children of yours. So if you were a guy with six wives, you could get them all pregnant the same night (busy!) but only the first two babies born will live and the rest die.

It’s an absolute limit: TWO children, no more, no how.

Yes, this would require magic to carry out. Maybe there is an all-powerful ** GOD ** who decides, You know? I told you to be fertile and multiply, but enough’s enough. New rules, guys!

Anyway, how would our world change? Obviously the human population would begin to decline, at least slowly, because some people by choice or happenstance wouldn’t use their allotment. (I think I’ve read that the steady state level requires something line 2.1 births per woman to cover this.)

But I think the impact on societies would be huge. Remember the old Cosby routine, where his father would threatened him with “I can always make more”? To a large degree, that idea is baked into how our world operates. What if we CAN’T always make more?

Would abortion rates go up? Down?

Would men become as worried about unintended pregnancies as women?

Would we be much less open to fighting wars? Without the unending competition for more land/resources driven by increasing populations, would we even be as likely to want to go to war?

Would immigrants be welcomed with open arms, as the only way to grow your country’s population?

Would every single born child be recognized as unbearably precious? What would happen to adoptions? Would children be taken from ‘bad’ parents much more swiftly?

Would the price of a sperm/ova donation hit $100,000? More?

Would SUVs fall out of favor?

2

We’d have to rethink how Social Security works.

3

In the short term, in the First World, it probably wouldn’t make much difference, because our fertility rate isn’t much higher than that to begin with. We would still see a drop, because our current average of 2ish consists of some with more and some with less, and the distribution would be truncated, but the basic social patterns would be intact.

It could well be immediately disastrous in the Third World, though, where large families are necessary, both to provide a workforce and to compensate for high infant and childhood mortality.

4

Would meddling with the sex ratio (like filtering out the “female” sperm for artificial insemination) count as a “cheat”?

5

More adoptions. And more permissive rules, probably resulting in outright baby-selling, not that it’s that much different now. Some people will be desperate for children, their natural born children may have passed away, or they want more than just two.

Increased concern for child health, safety, and welfare. The loss of a child will be of greater concern, I would expect top quality public healthcare for all children, very strong requirements on parents to keep their children safe.

The above two changes relate, we’ll see more children taken from their parents because of perceived parenting deficiencies and they’ll be rapidly placed with new parents.

6

Well if children can have children, problem is solved, we just keep borrowing from them. This just born baby is entitled to 2, etc.

It also fascinates me how places that lean atheistic in beliefs, which I include this board, often discuss limiting the number of children that ‘should’ be born/allowed.

7

Since some people would not have any, eventually the human race would die out.

8

You beat me to it.

If the maximum number of children anyone could have would be 2, then the average number of children born per woman would be less than 2, which would mean each generation would have fewer people than the previous generation.

Given that the current world population is in excess of 7 billion, it would take awhile for this to happen, but we’d eventually get there.

9

Maybe, but I tend to doubt it. For one thing, I think we are on the cusp of some rather radical life extension technologies. For another, even today you could get around the issue you and DrDeth brought up by saying that for people who choose not to have kids or couldn’t for some reason (or are killed before they could have the maximum 2) society could just basically use surrogates in one way or another to ensure species survival.

10

I was reading the hypothetical to allow every person to have two children, which means that a woman could have any number at all: two on her own credit, and then more babies on the man’s (or men’s) credit. A couple could have four babies, and future generations could grow.

True…but we already have to do that, as the population stabilizes, in real life. Social Security doesn’t absolutely depend on a growing population; it can always be balanced simply by (ugh) increasing the age at which benefits begin. (Making it less of a pension plan and more of a tontine.)

11

That’s what prompted my question to the OP about sex ratios. If we could establish a male/female ratio closer to 1:2 for the next generation, each woman in this generation would on average only have to bear 1.5 children.

Of course, this would mean that every male would have to produce two offspring, but I’d rather see mandatory sperm collection than forced pregnancies.

12

only problem is youd have to make it one boy and one girl other wise youd have the dilemma china does …just even worse in the 3rd world and asia

13

Yes, I was thinking of that. In a situation where having a child to take over your farm/fishing boat/whatever is your retirement plan, not having children is a disaster. Perhaps a system of adopting a child AND his parents might evolve? Likely by way of marriage: You’re a guy with a decent sized farmstead and a wife, but both your children died in a disease outbreak and you’ve both had your quota. So you find a poor widowed city woman with a child or two, and marry her and adopt her children. Of course the poor kid may have to support THREE parents through their old age, but he’d be moving up from inheriting nothing to being a landed farmowner, which could be fair deal.

Hmm. I’d say not. You could also test for the sex of the unborn child and abort the ‘wrong’ one and try again. But I don’t see that that helps the population as a whole. Each child uses up two tickets, one from a male and one from a female, which means you’d get the maximum number for the next generation by having basically equal numbers of boys/girls.

Or they could have ‘accidentally’ used up their tickets in various ways before got better sense.

Like you have a casual hookup with some girl, and unknown to you, she gets pregnant and has the child. (I wonder: would having a man’s child without his explicit consent be some sort of legal offense?)

Or a short-sighted college guy could think, Hey, I don’t want kids and Sperms’R’Us will pay me $30,000 for a donation, with a bonus $20,000 if a baby results. (Because I do expect that people wanting a child that is at least the child of one or the other will be willing to pay quite a lot for that.)

And fifteen years later he falls in love with a girl who very much wants to have her own children…whoops!

[QUOTE}Increased concern for child health, safety, and welfare. The loss of a child will be of greater concern, I would expect top quality public healthcare for all children, very strong requirements on parents to keep their children safe.

The above two changes relate, we’ll see more children taken from their parents because of perceived parenting deficiencies and they’ll be rapidly placed with new parents.[/QUOTE]

Yeah, that’s pretty much where I started. Today we have some children that are treated as having little value. Runaways that are closer to being thrownaways. Orphans that are too old or have physical/mental/emotional probems that keep them from being adopted. (There used to be a regular segment on the local news about children looking to be adopted, who weren’t snapped up because they weren’t perfect little infants or needed to stay together with some siblings or whatever.)

And one of the reasons the ‘system’ is so slow to terminate parental rights is that in many cases the circumstances they would be moved to might not be all that great, either.

I think that those problem would nearly vanish as soon as available children became rare opportunities to be leaped on.

True. You could carry it to ridiculous extremes: ‘generation after generation’ of children being raised by one set of parents by repetitive cloning. Not fair to the kids, of course, who would only get to have one (or none) children of their own. Probably need to make that illegal.

But… say your Billie was terribly injured in an accident, couldn’t you have come of his cells harvested and used to create Billie II, off the allotment Billie will never otherwise use?

And if you made two clones, could you sell one?

14

If we do somehow develop some radical life extending tech we will have to get serious about population/birth control. A lottery for the right to give birth would be the only fair way to avoid only the rich/pretty/strong/genetically superior being allowed to procreate.

15

I don’t think so. This is like saying in the 17th century that the world could never support 7 billion people (and being right, based on what was available at the time, and how people lived) and that we will need radical population/birth control if it ever got above 2 billion. I think there are plenty of technological changes that could make a population that ages much more slowly (or not at all) feasible, even if we assume, incorrectly IMHO, that people will simply keep having kids in exactly the same way as they do today (which is different than they did in the 17th century).

At any rate, even if we don’t get into what I’m sure many here consider sci-fi, I don’t think it would be an eventual extinction of our species if somehow the maximum per child limit was 2.

16

But if there’s only one donor for the clone, then the couple could have one child together and then each clone themselves. Three kids to raise. Or is that not allowed?

17

Hmmm. I think I made the wrong assumption about cloning before.

With a ‘normal’ baby, each parent only contributes 1/2 of its genes, and that counts as 1/2 of that person’s contribution to the next generation’s gene pool.

But with a clone, the donor contributes ALL of its genes, so maybe that should count twice as much towards the next generation.

So your choice comes to two normal children OR one clone.

Of course, there’s nothing to say that group marriages can’t come into style, so your ‘family’ might consist of 7 men and 4 women, children from various pairings in the family, some with sperm or egg donations from outside the grouping, adoptions, and a clone or two. It’s all good.

18

Given the hard limit of 2, it will happen - it just might take a little longer. I don’t the the OP’s premise allows you to buy baby rights. Babies, yes, but not the rights. So given that at least some parents won’t have 2, and that some children will die, we are still below replacement rate. Even more so since life extension won’t be 100% effective. Hard to extend one’s life when your plane blows up in the middle of the ocean.

19

One area not covered - there will be an immense growth in the genetic analysis of embryos. If you only get two, you will want to be damn sure the two you get are perfect. If the technology is good enough I can see most pregnancies coming from artificial insemination, where a bunch of embryos are analyzed and the best chosen for implantation.
If not, a big rise in abortions.

Baby furniture and accessories will have airbags. We bought a crib for our grandson, and it is armor plated compared to the one we got for our daughter 35 years ago. Ditto strollers and car seats. If an accident loses you one of your two chances, it would be even more of a disaster than today.
All car seats will have sensors that will call 911 if there is a baby in the car and the heat in the car starts to rise. I’m sure we can invent lots of other mega-safety features.
Nannies, nursery schools and day care centers would have to step up their insurance. Imagine how much a jury would give to a parent losing half their genetic legacy.

20

We’d soon have an entire planet of little Emperors and Empresses…