What do you think about Eugenics?

[Aroura]

Yes, it is.  But freedom has a price, and I'm not comfortable with the price of a mass extinction event.  That's just my personal opinion.

I think everyone should have the right to have 1-2 kids PER COUPLE, and after that, tough nuts. No more kids.

@cocunningham, I do think nature will take are of our overpopulation problem with something like what you have suggested, or some other fast spreading highly  deadly viral disease, but will it already be to late by then?

Instead of forced sterilization, governments could offer free sterilization and birth control to anyone who wants it.  Perhaps taxes could be lower for anyone who has between 0 and 2 children.  

Incentives are probably a better way to go about it than force, I agree there.  This would be a good option.

And yes, I support abortion rights.  I realize people should not be forced to do things withtheir bodies, but we force people to wear helmets and seatbelts so idiots don't kill themselves.  I think offering free sterelization and birth control, plus tax incentives for less children are good ideas.

The probelm then, of course, comes when people decide to have 19 children anyway, and cannot support them. Then people will scream and cry that the tax incentive punishes the children, and they are right BTW, not the parents.  So I'm not sure how to best deal with that.

This is all pipe dreams anyway.  We WILL overpopulate the planet and only make changes once we pass the critical stage and things become dire.  That just seems to be how humans work.

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The justification offered for reproductive limits and compulsory sterilization is future resource scarcity...and yet those of us with just two children or less - no coercion involved..are the ones with the lion's share of the resource pie...whilst the unwashed masses with 20 child families barely get a bite and are not, thusly, contributing to that problem through sheer weight of numbers...as your suggestion would seem to imply.  

Your suggestion...btw, might be construed as a call to sterilize the poor.........just tossing that out there in case you hadn't considered it.

I think that we might want to allocate resources better, before we go to jotting down a number of kids a person can have before Uncle Sam waves a scalpel at their genitals.  

This isn't just aimed at Americans, or rich people.  Although I agree that the west uses too many resources, that is tied right into our entitlement issues, which go hand in hand with this freedom to screw up the world notion so many westerners have.

And hey, poor people might have a bit more money if they didn't have 6 to 20 kids.  Yes, I'm being a bastard, but it's true.  Giving them the option to have less children, and a financial incentive to boot, as someone else suggested, might help lift them out of poverty.  Did you consider that?  I'm very poor by american standards (because I'm disabled) so I chose voluntary sterilization after just one child.  Because of just one child, we have been able to slowly improve our lives. If I'd continued to have more children, I expect I'd be one of the unwashed masses, as you say, by now.

But this is because I had the education and drive to do so.  Most people....dare I say because of religion? though also basic biology...are driven to have many children even when they cannot afford them and it drives them deeper into poverty.  I see it all around me.  A family with one child just getting by, but they are able to take good care of that child still.  Then they have another, and it now they require government assistance.  Then they have another, and they have to move into a smaller apartment, often in a high crime area, despite having a bigger family....and so forth and so on.


When given some education and financial incentives, maybe people would make better choices about how many children they should have.  IF they don't, should we force them?  I don't know.  I hate the idea, but I hate the idea of future generations inheriting a destroyed environment much more.  So it's hard for me.  

(Also, overpopulation in places like China, India and Indonisia ARE a problem, they cause more disease, and starvation for those people.  I'm not just taking about America or rich people, really I'm not, I'm talking about humanity as a whole, and how we all need to make more responsible choices about reproduction.

I'm not trying to be cavelier about any of this. I don't think it's an easy thing, and any decision we as a society make, including not addressing it at all, will have far reaching implications and consequences.

Obviously there are MANY other areas where we need to make more responsible choices as well, but this thread is about eugenics, not about western consumerism.