Demographic emergency does not erase moral limits. The more serious a society becomes about fertility, the more carefully it has to distinguish inconvenience from injustice, persuasion from compulsion, and sacrifice from the use of one person as material for someone else’s plan.
Boundaries to develop
- No person is valuable principally as a future worker, soldier, taxpayer, caregiver, settler, or parent.
- No population target can authorize sexual violence, forced marriage, compulsory pregnancy, forced abortion, sterilization, eugenics, or the destruction and instrumental use of embryonic life.
- Children should be received as persons with their own good, not manufactured to meet a quota or designed for a social role.
- Freedom is not mere preference, but neither can responsibility be produced through terror or intimate surveillance.
- A policy that preserves institutions by destroying equality before the law, family integrity, or bodily security may preserve capacity while losing the civilization that made the capacity worth saving.
Harder cases
The research should not stop at obvious atrocities. It should examine policies that are legal and nonviolent but still place severe pressure on people who do not marry or have children; policies that make one household subsidize another; communities whose expectations are formally voluntary but costly to leave; and technologies that promise wanted children while obscuring the lives created, selected, frozen, or discarded along the way.
The role of the state
- What may law prohibit because an act violates another person’s life or rights?
- What may government encourage without turning a good into a quota?
- Which responsibilities belong to spouses, families, churches, employers, cities, or voluntary communities instead?
- How does subsidiarity limit centralized administration while solidarity prevents families from being left alone with every cost?