[EpicEng]

>or alternatively a ban on having children if the parents can't provide an equivalent payment.

Yours is the stuff dystopian literature is made of. You want to severely limit freedom for the greater good, a tactic which never works.

[devit]

I don't think people should be entitled to the freedom of having children no matter what, since having children forces significant externalities on society, especially if there's an agreement that everyone should have a good standard of living (as implied by this article) or even just that there's a right to healthcare; and even without those, since the children may become criminals and harm others.

The root causes of poverty and violent crime are people who have children but are not able or willing to properly educate them and support them financially, so the simplest fix is to prevent that from happening (by forcing them to have an abortion).

That said, an alternate solution is for the state to step in if parents can't or unconditionally, although some sort of population control might be required anyway.

[EpicEng]

>the simplest fix is to prevent that from happening (by forcing them to have an abortion

Simple doesn't mean best or even acceptible. The simplest solution for stopping many forms of crime is to institute martial law, yet we do not do so because we view it as an extreme form of oppression and tyranny. I don't see any positive outcome from a government telling people under which circumstances they are allowed to procreate unless we are in dire straights (e.g. massive, world wide, irrecoverable famine. We're not there and we're not going to be there any time soon.)

[LyndsySimon]

> so the simplest fix is to prevent that from happening (by forcing them to have an abortion).

Who pays for the abortion?

If someone conceives children without permission multiple times, wouldn't be it cheaper just to kill them so as to prevent them from consuming resources without permission? or should we merely forcibly sterilize them?

[wetpaws]

Yikes, that does not sound like a good society to live in.

[fatalVoltage]

How is this dystopian though? If you can't provide for your children why have them in the first place?

[EpicEng]

How is limiting basic human freedoms dystopian? It's textbook tyranny.

[fatalVoltage]

While I agree it's a basic human right to have children, there should be some limitation as to who can have them - if you're obviously not in a condition to care and provide for offspring you shouldn't be allowed to. Now you might ask - okay but who decides what that standard is, and you'd be correct in asking, but that's a whole other question.