What goes around comes around & now Jonathan Porritt, leading environmentalist & government adviser has come right out & said we should all limit ourselves to 2 children
The problem with this is that it does rather depend on the old fashioned model in which procreation took place only within marriage & marriage was for life
And, although this may be the unstated aim, if no couple has more than 2 children the population will decline. First because some people will have only one or no children, & secondly because the average number of children per woman needs to be slightly more than 2 to allow for those that die before they themselves reach the age of reproduction
So the idea is that every person should have a permit to have one child. These permits could be traded quite freely – people who want more than their allowance can buy permits from those who cannot or do not want to make use of theirs
On second thoughts each person should have 2 permits, each for half a child. This fits the way Nature works, & would avoid the possibility of even more acrimonious arguments on divorce as couples dispute whose permit was used up for their one existing child
The system would encourage those who had already used up their quota to be extra specially careful with their contraception – no method lives up to its clinically proven reliability because humans are all too easily swayed into taking silly risks. If the risk has a financial penalty attached, they will think about these things much more carefully
It might be considered that the rich would have an unfair advantage – as if they did not have them anyway. But we could expect one side effect to be a reduction in the rate of teenage pregnancy, as the young & feckless could be relied upon to prefer cash in hand to the bother of a baby
And if they then go ahead & get pregnant anyway, without a permit? Well, we know perfectly well how to deal with that
There will be some hard cases though: people whose second baby turns out to be twins, for example
One way around this might be for every persons unused permits to be taken away from them on their 50th birthday. A government quango, or charitable organisation, could distribute these to deserving cases. And each year the demographers could calculate the precise average number of births per woman needed to maintain the population in its steady state. These extra fractions of a baby could be aggregated & distributed to deserving cases in the normal way
Related post
