So........is it socially unacceptable to have more than two children these days?

[electra]

I have three. I have one friend in particular who has regularly makes snippy comments about how many more am I going to push out.

Recently I took dd3 to the GP and dd2 was with us. The GP is one I have known for years but have not seen for a while. She looked at dd3, looked at dd2 and back again. And then looked at me and said

'So....how many have you got now??

Do the rest of you encounter this? Is it worse if you're a lone parent perhaps?!

MuseumOfCurry I suppose on the whole children born in the poorest of families in the UK don't really starve to death in pain and agony. There is in most cases a level of social care and health care. Sadly in parts of third world starvation and death from curable diseases is common. We are all lucky to win the golden ticket live in the developed world. I think there is a stark difference in what we consider a poor family in the UK and a poor family in say South Sudan. So yes I do think there is a difference in terms of consequence and the human suffering it brings.

Sure, it's a different scale of poverty but there is no doubt that the prospects for children born into poverty in the UK are grim, so there's an analogy to be made.

But we wouldn't accept it as ethical to visit poor council estates in the UK and push birth control on women. This would be considered an infringement on personal liberty.

But our society needs a healthy influx of the younger generation.

This is the kind of pyramid-scheme thinking that I was referring to upthread a bit. I completely understand and in fact agree that a stable population is good for the economy and pensions. But that's because of our own shortsightedness in devising a chain-mail scheme for paying pensions.

I don't think we can afford to prioritise the well-being of the elderly, important though that might be, over the well-being of the planet i.e. population any longer. I'd be delighted if this weren't true, but I suspect very much it is.

If you look at global population data it indicated that providing reliable contraception, and educating women to a good standard, result in women choosing to have smaller families. This is obviously going to be the way forward for the planet didn't work in my case obviously