A thought experiment becomes evasive if it considers only ideas its author already finds respectable. This section will map the full range of measures a frightened or ambitious society might propose. No proposal becomes prudent, permissible, or desirable merely by appearing on the map.
Drafting notes (not yet prose)
This is the set piece for contemporary and speculative tools. History has already been told in the old-answers section; do not retell the Sabines or Nazi policy here except as a light “this already existed” pointer. The section should feel slightly too complete. Pick the item in each category that does the most work; mention neighbors. Do not pre-filter for respectability.
Rubric for each: mechanism, likely magnitude, time horizon, reversibility, administrative power, distribution of costs, effects on marriage and children, what kind of government or community could carry it out, and how close it sits to something that already exists.
Radical redistribution toward families
- Family-scale tax, debt cancellation, housing priority, a parent income independent of two continuous careers.
- Public assumption of major private costs: birth, education, healthcare, care work.
- Distributional conflict between parents, nonparents, generations, and taxpayers.
- Do not rebuild chapter 5’s France/Hungary/Korea case studies. Point back, then go larger.
Sticks, privileges, and higher parity
- Tax the childless on every paycheck (Molson Hart). Distinguish a household tax that makes dependents count from a tax whose purpose is to mark the childless as parasites.
- Parent-priority queues: airport, DMV, parking, permits, tolls. Convenience as status signal more than as a fertility engine.
- Sumptuary signals, including comic ones (ban purple, ban luxury cars). Arbitrary status rituals have a history; ask what the ritual is for.
- Parent-only voting (a reply under Molson). Analyze as a mechanism; do not skip it for being rude.
- Simon Sarris: push the 3rd and 4th child rather than convert the childless; four as a household tipping point because older children start to carry the household; retooling social security would work and would be hated.
- Pension systems that already credit childrearing (Germany’s Kindererziehungszeiten; French insurance quarters) as existence proofs for the Sarris idea. See
ref.md. - Singapore’s 2026 SG Child Support Package as the latest “make parenthood easier” stack (cash, leave, housing ballots, cheap childcare). One short pass; it is chapter 5 in 2026 clothes. Primary: population.gov.sg / madeforfamilies.gov.sg.
Reordering work, education, and adulthood
- Shorter credentials and earlier economic independence (chapter 6 has the modest version; this section is the scaled or compulsory version).
- National or civic service organized around family formation.
- Mobility limits so kin stay near.
- National matchmaking.
- Much of the women’s-work material lives in the previous section; here only the catalog remainder (quotas, bans, service).
Restrictions on practices that suppress births
- Laws and subsidies involving abortion, contraception, sterilization, divorce, and reproductive technology—as demographic levers, not only as moral questions.
- Chapter 5 already has Title X, Roe/Dobbs magnitudes. One hard paragraph plus the enforcement/black-market/unequal-burden questions.
- Distinguish protection of unborn life and marriage from policies whose purpose is demographic compulsion.
Direct demographic control
- Birth quotas, compulsory marriage, assigned partners, reproductive licensing, confinement, kidnapping, sexual violence.
- Eugenic selection over who may or must reproduce.
- Treat these as boundary cases that still get the same rubric, not as a shocked list of things we would never discuss.
- China’s one-child policy (already in chapter 5) as the quota-in-reverse warning.
Technological and utopian proposals
- Artificial gestation, in-vitro gametogenesis, embryo selection, cloning.
- AI matchmaking, predictive fertility systems, intimate surveillance.
- New settlements designed around family formation.
- Healing infertility versus manufacturing people to specification.