Poemranker [Replying] Thu Nov 21 15:18:08 PST 2024

Replying to a comment on:

In another age, I would have married young, To a pre-selected man from my village, had too many children, broken my back with my hands, died early, rested beneath the second of three crosses behind his house, while our hated king lived on a far away hill. I would have believed in servitude and done what the priest said, until my husband came home drunk, layed me and fell asleep. Then I would have hung a red lantern for seafare to Paris.

Ranger

15-Oct-06/2:43 PM

Well I've never been to India or any third world nations, so I'll take your word for it (Amanda doesn't seem particularly enslaved though, to be fair). I wouldn't want to see anyone have to live as a slave, man, woman or child. But similarly, being totally freed will not make any impact on the situation, I don't think. If you're talking about children being born purely as workers, then simply changing attitudes won't do anything. Kids will still be mass-conceived purely out of necessity. You've got to find some way of making everyone richer without adversely affecting the economy.
If you say everyone should be totally free, you can't then limit the number of children they can have. You can't even set an unofficial 'target', because that's doing pretty much the same thing as enforcing a strict limit, except it's being done through emotional blackmail rather than armed troops. And hasn't China proven that even if you do set a child cap, the population will still swell uncontrollably?

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