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Posted by Marianne on 2/21/2006, 7:36:34, in reply to "Re: You almost sound critical..."
You can't confuse the issues - it's wrong to torture people. But if you found a case where the Chinese govt. tortured a murderer, you wouldn't want to say that occurence proved they were wrong to have a policy against murdering.
So yes, I agree that no-one should undergo a forced abortion, and yes, I agree no-one should be tortured - but that doesn't, in itself, convince me that restricting family size is necessarily a bad policy.

I don't know enough to know. I suppose the question that would interest me is, leaving China aside, do you believe that reproduction is a fundamental human right, or do you think any government would ever have a right to enforce some degree of population control?

I know it's not a problem in Europe, and I don't think it's a problem in the States, but at the same time, the population of the world has doubled in forty years. Say, nightmare scenario, you were living in a country which, even though it allowed emigration, had a population that was living at subsidence levels and had no extra resources to divert into providing for extra people. And say there was a high birth rate, and your population was going to increase a lot.
When you say "make the people responsible for feeding themselves" would your thinking be that the citizens know all these things, and therefore, if they choose to have babies in the knowledge that a percentage of these babies can't survive, it's not the state's place to intervene?
That the state can only educate, advise, cajole?

Or, to put the thought experiment differently, say you know your country can feed 100m babies this year, but 200m will be born. Is any kind of state intervention acceptable? Would it be tolerable to restrict family size to two/three/eight babies a couple, or means test families so they only produced children if they could afford to feed them, or to pay couples not to reproduce? Or not?


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