Thats's just the dumb way to do it, because that's not how populations work. Educate people and allow them to thrive in society, they will have less children on their own.

Youre perpetuating a myth, not an unpopular opinion.

Just curious, you do know that such a rule would eventually reduce the human race to nill? Natural and unnatural deaths requires 2,X to remain at same level.

Btw, you should watch the British series Utopia

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia_(British_TV_series)

You can help by having zero.

I'm mostly concerned at how many clueless people upvoted this dumb take

Attached is a graph of global population projections from Wikipedia. You can see the median projection forecast a plateau and drop this century and half project more significant drops. I find the drops more likely because they correlate the affect of development and human rights on the birth rate rather than the naive “assume nothing changes” of the continued growth projections

More development, human rights, education of women have a proven history of people choosing a reduced birth rate. We can approach a more sustainable population simply by making everyone’s life better

No. It's working out fine. Limits cause odd knock on effects when people prefer one sex over the other, and population growth is moderating now, the reason population still grows is old people living longer, it's not too many kids.

You need an average of 2 or less not a mandate.

If all women tomorrow said they were on strike, no more kids, at all, ever, are you going to mandate pregnancy? Who decides? Who is making these rules?

Well, that certainly is an unpopular opinion. Do I upvote or downvote?

Well this sure is an unpopular opinion. Mostly because there is no way to define or enforce this and a draconian limitation of individual rights to a nonexistent problem, over population is a smoke screen. There is more than enough land and resources to support billions more people.

This is literally captilsism 101, if the rich have you angry at other humans that don't even exist yet you will spend less time on disturbing the resources they are hoarding.

Thinking it's easier to enforce humanity wide birth control than to tax and build houses in the empty areas is dillusional.

Who animated this shambling, tired malthusian corpse

Developed nations are seeing declining birth rates. I don't think we need to do anything.

Every time someone raised the alarm about population growth, some unforeseen innovation made it a non-issue.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism

Children aren't the problem. Late stage capitalism is. We have the technology and resources to feed everyone in the world but we don't. Because it's not profitable.

We reward billionaires more wealth than they could ever spend in their lives. Why? For accidentally being in the right place and time to take advantage of an opportunity. We pretend they're special, but it really comes down to mostly luck. That wealth could lift humanity out of poverty.

We need to make a new system that rewards people for doing what needs to be done, not for what's profitable.

I think people shouldn't have any kids.

Well, this will certainly be an unpopular opinion, so at least it matches the community! :-)

Population control just ends up as trying to control marginalised bodies. Stop trying to mess with uteri.

People get children without being a couple.

What even is the definition of a couple and why should that determine the number?

Unlike just about everyone else here, I agree with this 100%. Population does not need to increase. Take either men or women and limit their number of children to 2; that would ensure a 1-to-1 replacement with the exception of early deaths. Once population decreases, maybe increase the limit to 3 if the numbers support it.

I'm not sure where I heard this quote, but it holds true here: "Save the earth; don't give birth."

I'm honestly in favor of it. Before everyone jumps down my throat, I'm not saying how China did it was the right way.

But we are barreling towards a very unsustainable future. This century is going to be very dire for these next generations. We simply do not have the resources.

There are some great "hacks" I'll call them. GMOs, urban farming, etc, but those just treat the symptoms.

I'm not having kids and this is one of the big reasons why. My family thinks I'm crazy but from my point of view I'm just bringing kids into this world to suffer, so if I do that then it's only for selfish reasons. And with that line of thought I think people who willingly have more than, oh, let's say 3 kids are selfish.

It's harsh, but seriously look around. It's unmaintainable, we can't keep going at infinite growth.

Unfortunately it will never be implemented because there is no way to do it without bias. Sterilizations have always had bias, along race, class, religion, and those I'm against. This is more me yelling into the void "For the love of God stop having kids! You do not need 5 kids! We can't continue with this exponential curve on this one tiny planet!"

Violation of body autonomy is of the absolute most profound violations and the state has no right to do that. Whether or not people SHOULD have kids is irrelevant; even if they shouldn't, there exists no acceptable power lever to prevent it.

It's also a solution in search of a problem. Human population growth is already slowing and will likely plateau in my lifetime before starting a trend of retreat. Assuming we aren't all dead by way of the collapsing climate already.

Sorry, but I'm disagreeing with you, in an unpopular way ...

: P

the average reproductive-rate need be managed,

BUT ...

it is much saner to have some couples childfree ( which many, if not the majority, nowadays, want ), & then have total support for the reproducing mothers.

I wouldn't want any genetic child-of-mine to exist, for any reason whatsoever.

However, since your, & my, & everyone's, Soul/CellOfGod/ChildOfGod can ONLY have life-experiencings in a life, and since our Souls/Continuums already competed successfully for conceptions/lives,

then it'd be idiotic to block/deny all other Souls/CellsOfGod to have lives of their own.

( that isn't against your argument, that is against others' arguments, in the reproduction debate )

Since many lives want to NOT reproduce, but to instead have their own lives for adult living, and not for children-family living, isn't that a right, too?

Therefore, to keep the reproductive-rate where it needs to be, to fend-off economic-collapse ( there needs to be sufficient next-generation, or collapse enforces economic hellscape on all of us ), those who do reproduce, need to do-so at the required rate,

and, obviously, social-support, education, etc, needs to be configured to back this reality.

See?

_ /\ _

I already have two and cannot understand why anyone would want anymore...that said, no.

Maybe start by not making people who don't want babies have them...

It's almost always childless young men saying this.

For a truly contentious opinion I'd love to see a married woman with three kids say it.

China.

If you wanna end up with billions of dead baby girls, sure, cuz that's what happens.

Instead, best way to curve overpopulation is just improve education.

Also we still have tonnes and tonnes of room for growth if we just stopped being incredibly wasteful. We produce multiple times the food to feed everyone on earth already, but almost all of it ends up thrown out and wasted.

We need a fundamental shift in priorities, and better push on legislation to get food into people's mouths.

By default I would normally agree with you, but after reading some people’s responses, now I’m not so sure. The internet is still cool in that regard.

How, though? Without more specifics about how the "limit" would work, this statement is fairly meaningless.

(Not to say that I'm necessarily onboard with any single specific way I can conceive of that would establish a "limit" on how many children people can have.)

What's a "couple"? Would governments do something bad (a fine, jail time, etc) to people who had a third child as a punishment/deterrent? If jail time, what would be done with the two kids they ostensibly already have? Would some people who already have two kids be forced on threat of incarceration to undergo abortions and/or sterilization? Maybe all the governments on earth would just make it legal for any person to kill any child with two or more older siblings on sight, hmm? (There's a lot of sarcasm in this paragraph. I hope that's obvious, but maybe it's good to point it out explicitly anyway.)

There is a lot that governments can do to "encourage" a lower birth rate that wouldn't be draconian like throwing people in jail for having kids. Like free birth control, for instance. More funding for womens' healthcare organizations. The word "limit" in your post makes it seem like that's not what you're going for at all.