I personally believe that it is selfish to have more than two biological children (regardless of our means to support them). If we look at the crises looming on the horizon for the world pretty much all of them can be traced back to over-population:

• Food shortages
• Energy depletion
• Pollution
• Global Warming
• Species extinction
• Territorial/Energy wars
• Lethal pandemics
• deforestation and desertification

To put it bluntly, there are too many people on this planet already and not enough resources. The world population reached 7 billion recently. In 1974, just half a life-time ago, it was 4 billion.

The only way to reduce this number is for people to have less children. If a couple have 2 children between them, then they will have replaced themselves. If however, they have, for example, 4 children, they have increased the total number of humans by 2. That's 2 extra people who need a lifetime's supply of food, drinking water, living area and energy.

As the numbers of people pile up the quality of life on this planet is going to drop for everyone. This is true even in a relatively low population density western countries. Our lifestyle is based on a large supply of energy and resources which are diverted from other countries.

I realise that this may be a controversial opinion. This thread came about as a result of an argument I had with a friend of mine, who happens to be a student obstetrician. Needless to say she was horrified by my point of view.

It's a complex and emotive topic and a lot of questions are thrown up. I'll try and go through some of the ones I can imagine:

Q. Well, I can kinda see your point but I want to have a big family anyway.
A. Why not have two of your own and adopt and foster some more?

Q. How about all those people in Asia and Africa having 8 children. They're the ones who need to be responsible not us!
A. Family size is coming down across the developing world with the rise in education and contraception. In the developed world we have to lead by example since we really do have the luxury of choosing (with our social security and healthcare net). We also consume far more resources per capita than the average person from the developed world so it's not as lopsided as it first appears.

Q This doesn't apply to me, I've earned enough money so that I can support a large family of my own.
A The number of resources on the planet is fixed. If you are wealthy and can afford more that just means that you're going to be taking someone else's share.

Q Surely we can continue at our present growth rates so long as we cut down our carbon footprints and grow sustainability.
A When it comes to human population, the only sustainable growth is zero growth.

meh. TLDR, but i think ppl should be able to have as many as they want. the selfishness comes into effect though when it is the ppl living in impoverished conditions and 1) cant provide properly 2) eat off everyone else that is working hard(collecting food stamps and stuff)

whatevs, 7 billion people in the world, we have bigger problems than having more than two kids

if your criteria for selfishness is global over population, then its selfish to have any

What if someone's kid dies for some reason, are they allowed to have another one?

Yep, previous humans have ****ed things up for the rest of us who want to have 12 children powerhouse families, unfortunately

We need to act now, China has the right idea

It is selfish to have more than zero children.

Not even sure where to start with this.

The various favelas around the world can overpopulate like crazy but *nobody* should have more than two kids? Solid.

Selfish, no

Injurious to your own sanity, probably

Quite a few pregnancies are unplanned.

If it's overpopulation that you're worried about, where do you stand on the idea of culling humans?

I mean, we cull deer, seals, badgers, whatever else reaches a state of overpopulation or otherwise gets in our way, yet when someone kills a few thousand **** sapiens and buries them in a big hole in the forest, we ship them off to The Hague on a charge of genocide. We're not exactly on the IUCN red list, are we? If ever a species was out of control it's us, so why is it such a no-no?

It would certainly relieve pressure on some of the problems in OP's bullet list

Idiocracy (2006)

I Beleive in culling around 4bn people. I don't want my 13 children to struggle for resources

it is for most other people but since my genes are so awesome it would be selfish for me not to have more than 2 kids

Of course it is selfish. But it is basically self-ish to consume any resources at all. It is selfish not to kill yourself and leave me your money.

Whom should we start with?
****ty comedy writers?

Some country should implement some sort of required standardized test for reproduction and if you're too stupid you get your tubes tied/vasectomy.

Set the cutoff pretty high for like 100 years and bam, intelligent population.

Yeah I've been drinking

fk your human rights

What makes you say the resources are fixed? This is a very limited view of economics...

As the best dad in the world with good genes, any number of children I have will be a huge positive to society. I should get paid to have more.

what would the penalties be if you failed the test and then got pregnant? would there be forced abortions? can you retake?

First thing I thought of, http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1wq_edHqpdA

We could use some babies in Singapore. Our fertility rate is 1.19 births per woman.

If you are living on food stamps obviously it would be incredibly selfish to have tonnes of kids. Since you don't you should do whatever you want so long as you can provide for your kids.

More than anything, it's idiotic.

NBA luxury tax imo. Up to 2 kids is free, but each one after that costs a bunch of money. Give money to poorer countries.

But really, you can't stop people from doing things because you think it's selfish and then go out to a bar and spend enough money to feed an African family for a year. The other side of the coin is just to limit resource consumption and allow more people to survive on those resources.

Selfish to have children?

What?

The irony is that when you do have children your actions toward your children become entirely selfless. Unless, you're a sociopath, or an immoral/amoral degenerate.

We're not talking about economics, which is a load of BS anyway. We're talking about an ecosystem.

Unbelievably ignorant and selfish people ITT.

Selfish relative to the rest of the world I think, because you're consuming more resources than you "needed" to.

Which is dumb anyway because not being fat consumes less resources, not being wasteful consumes less resources, not having anything more than you need consumes less resources, etc but somehow not having children is the answer.