By Robert Laurie ——Bio and Archives--November 2, 2015
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China has just announced that it is giving up its infamous one-child policy. While the Chinese government has been creating more exceptions to the one-child rule in recent years, this is the first time officials have announced that all couples may have two children if they so choose. The change is being applauded around the world, but it raises the question: Is this really a good thing? Of course, China has enforced its one-child policy in unacceptable ways. Forced abortions and forced sterilizations are simply assault and clearly violate human rights. Still, the idea that people should limit the number of children they have to just one is not, I would argue, a bad one, for the Chinese or for the rest of us.Conly goes on to argue that human reproduction is decimating the planet, and one child policies are the most effective way to ensure that we reverse the trend. We have, she claims, no moral right to more than one baby.
Given the damage we are causing, and the suffering we foresee for all those who live after us, it is clear that having more than one child is just something that none of us — Chinese or American — has a moral right to do. We have no right to cause great harm to others when we can avoid this without great loss to ourselves.
Lastly, if we ever did discover that we needed sanctions to get people to refrain from having an unsustainable number of children, they wouldn’t be physical in nature. Fines may be the best way to go, and again, there is reason to think suitable fines, fixed on a sliding scale relative to income, can be effective — not 100 percent effective, which no regulation ever is, but effective enough.And if you refuse to pay the fine? Well, we assume they'll just take it through force, put you in jail, etc. If you're thinking this "violates your rights," forget it. You don't really have any. Ms. Conly and her cadre of statist leeches will determine your rights. She argues that your free speech is already limited because "you don't have a right to shout fire in a crowded theater" and, apparently, this is no different. At this point, uncontrolled fertility is likely to have worse consequences than the false cry of “fire!” Even having two children — the replacement value for the population — as the new Chinese policy allows is likely to be too many children. If that's the case - if we're really talking about the end of all life on Earth - one wonders why Ms. Conly thinks we have a "moral right" to even one child. Wouldn't a "no child" policy solve the problem even faster? Of course, environmentalism isn't really the point. As with all things statist, the real goal is federal control of your life. In her books (yes there are books) Conly actually posits that "autonomy, or the freedom to act in accordance with your own decisions, is overrated-that the common high evaluation of the importance of autonomy is based on a belief that we are much more rational than we actually are." You may think this all sounds like the fevered rantings of an insane person drowning in a tank of Red Bull and vodka, but nothing could be further from the truth. Sarah Conly is an "associate professor of philosophy at Bowdoin College." So you know she's an upstanding member of society who is highly intelligent and whose job is of the utmost importance to us all.
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