Contraception should be mandatory for both sexes until they have passed a fit for parenting exam: theory and practice.

[HullyEastergully]

I'm serious.

Isn't fertility declining, so what is all the concern with population.

Thank you Tethers, reading that extract about Human Rights, women in Africa have little control over their reproduction. Many do not have access to contraception. Surely the act was meant to extend rights to all women.

Whilst I agree with the statement "no one has to right to reproduce" because I don't agree with funding fertility treatment on the NHS, I don't believe anyone has a right to other peoples bodies and their reproductive ability.

I think the idea of the state controlling reproduction is dangerous. The state can not be trusted. The state might decide that two children are too many, poor people are not permitted to have any children, women with blonde hair must be prevented from breeding at all costs etc, they might then decide we don't have enough children and decide to enforce conception upon certain women with certain characteristics.

You haven't given a feasible way to make it happen though.

How will you do it?

What will the punishment be for not complying?

What evidence is there that abusive parents are incapable of pretending to be good parents when under exam conditions?

Two points:
Even if fertility declines it simply means the world's population will increase at a slightly slower rate. It cannot support so many people.

And generally the folk who disapprove of the NHS funding fertility treatment have their own children already.

I don't think it will be necessary to change the law to make certain that some people do not breed. Changes to the benefits system being implemented by now is likely to be quite effective. As is the fact that women in the west have control over their reproduction. Its been proven that women who are educated and have access to opportunities for work and access to contraception have fewer children. Women can choose to have fewer children. many do because they also wish not to be pregnant for most of their adult lives and they like working. If you give women incentives not to have children.......they won't. Give them incentives to have children and they will.

I think there should be an exam for the foetus.

If they don't pass they 'ain't coming out.

Should the NHS fund fertility treatment to those that pass this exam ?

If we are going to put the need to decrease the earth's population over enshrined human rights, then there is a much quicker way to do it...

I thought the elites had already decided that we were over crowded

Do they not already have various means of culling us all?

Oh, let's just have a war. That'll weed out a few people.
Iran, anyone?

Tethers Oh I do like that suggestion....in fact why not combine both together...someone asked what the punishment for having a child without permission was....the obvious answer would be if you reproduce without permission then the child replaces you!

one in one out rule.

could work

similar idiot thread

nuff said!

Mine is not an idiot thread.

people just don't ike to think beyond the existing.

From the OP on that thread

Apparently huge numbers of new parents say "when I left hospital the first time, I felt terrified; no-one had given me any education on what to do"

YES they had, that's what your own parents are for.

Why do we need the state to provide everything. Whilst I am the first the hop up and down about a shrinking state and the cuts, I really wonder why middle class, educated people from fairly comfortable backgrounds should need Big brother to tell them how to change a nappy.

I think that one of the big problems this world is facing is the completely bonkers belief that everything is best determined by markets.
However I would far rather see rules applied to resources than to people's bodies. If a serious attempt was made to determine ethically rather than commercially how resources were distributed, yes, it might look iconoclastic but you could do a lot without having to go anywhere such vile abuses of persons as proposed on this thread.
This thread is clearly wrong on a million levels, but the only bit which makes sense is that if we showed the will to do so, there is so much we could do for people. we don't because we are being brainwashed into accepting certain conditions as being fate, like the climate, when actually they are deliberately imposed because they make certain people rich

Coming back to the issue of who can and should have children, there is a direct link between poverty and poor outcomes for children. Address the resources (this is a global issue as well as local one), instead of rolling over for the markets, and you might get somewhere

Well said, lost.

I would have probably failed a test like this due to my mental health history, and yet I have happy, healthy kids who are doing well at school. Good parents aren't always perfect people IYSWIM.

Flawed. Simply because you are presuming that all crap parents are uneducated and stupid. Not true. Many crap parents would fly through a test, doesn't mean they then make great parents in reality.

Also we are not living under the Gestapo.

YANBU

Agreed, lost.

Ariel - Not according to the United Nations. Their report on population states that the current rate is 2.45, and at the current rate (which has been declining since the 50s) the population levels will begin to decrease after 2050 . We have to get over the bump of people already here born when birth rates were higher. If one were to view the population as the main problem (rather than the horrendous way resources are stolen and distributed) you'd deal with the far larger population...which would be us not babies.

Personally, having countries and multinational companies having to pass an ethics exam and yearly portfolios proving continued ethics before being allowed to do anything in a country outside of its origins (particularly in resource mining and exports, would have to include tax) would give far better results. Ethical companies would give the resources that would leave the local population with better care and education - which is already shown to lower the birth rate - and would start us on the road to better resource usage.

OK I believe you! So what's all the stuff about the world's population being 9 million by 2050? Or will it be, and then will it start declining?

I think it is an incredibly crap idea. Who gets to decide what is good parenting? I think some of the hoops you need to jump through to adopt are stupid and I disagree with a lot of mainstream 'good parenting'.

Plus what enforced contraception? Hormones, god no. Surgery?? Yeah, nothing could go wrong there.

All a bit brave new world ish.

Who gets to mark the exam papers? What gives them the right to judge my parenting skills? Is there an appeal process?

I think a lot of this works off the idea that its mainly benefit parents who are bad parents which everyone knows is not true,

I wonder how many 'wealthy' parents to be would be expected to pass an exam.

2 questions:

Q1: Do you actually want to have a child? Both of you?
Q2: Do you want a child enough to stop smoking, taking recreational drugs and drinking (at all during pg, and to excess for the next 18 years)?

I reckon if you stopped the people who don't answer Yes to both from breeding then you'd send the world population into free fall without the slightest hint of abuse of human rights. An enormous percentage of births are unplanned, and the ones who want kids but not enough to kick drugs shouldn't be allowed them.

(that said, I know that "shouldn't be allowed them" raises ugly spectres in terms of real world policy intervention. But in a magic world, every child would be a wanted, deliberately conceived child, and every boy and girl would have magic infallible reversible contraception implanted at puberty, and you'd need to pass a drugs/alcohol/nicotine test to get it reversed.