Freedom, Coercion, and Family Size

by David C. Huff

The freedom of a husband and wife to bear as many children as they wish is an implicit aspect of the principles of liberty upon which our nation was founded. America's early citizens and statesmen clearly understood the many social and economic advantages of large families, recognizing in the family structure a rich treasure of ingredients for the sustenance of society which far overshadows any benefits a civil government can provide.

In recent years, however, the concept of the family as a cornerstone of the free society, a principal steward of capital, and an important factor (through steady population growth) in economic vitality has come under increasing criticism. Most parents with more than two children are finding that large families are being subtly and sometimes noisily discouraged. The task for advocates of freedom is to examine and evaluate the root ideology which informs the move to limit family size.

Any consideration of the freedoms involved in choosing family size necessarily involves the larger issue of ownership and property rights. To even question the fact that the ownership and responsibility for children vests exclusively in their parents once would have seemed superfluous. Yet in the current environment of Zero Population Growth, Planned Parenthood, and Global 2000, private ownership of children no longer enjoys unanimous consent.

Over the last few decades, government institutions and agencies have assumed an increasing share of the costs involved in bringing up children. And though many parents have willingly handed over this responsibility to the state, they overlook the inherent dangers involved. Allowing the state to foot more and more of the bills for child-rearing invites the state to assert and exercise an imagined right of control over children.

Given that the tenets of interventionism idolize the state as a benevolent, all-wise parent, it is only natural for a government to concoct policies which arrogate the ultimate control of family size to the state. Usurping property rights over children is one way a bureaucracy attains its desired position of pseudo-parent, and thereby the power to establish and enforce arbitrary limitations on childbearing.

Most of the barbs directed at prolific parents are launched from the various elements of the population control movement. Their basic message is that our planet is becoming overpopulated, which in turn will purportedly cause food shortages, destroy the balance of nature, wreck economies, and generally drive civilized society into extinction.

These ideas originated in the theories of Thomas Malthus, who two centuries ago predicted a population crisis which would shackle the world in the perpetual grip of poverty. The passage of time, however, has not seen his dismal prophecies fulfilled; instead, it has yielded decades of experience indicating healthy population growth is an asset, not a threat.

The precepts of Malthus are ideologically at war with the principle of human capital expansion through population increase and, though substantially disproven, are still clung to by social planners. Such tenacity on the part of population control proponents is an enigma, since the evidence in favor of large families and growth is ample.

Accordingly, to fully comprehend the real issue, one must uncover the motivation of those who fret over the "population bomb." Is the issue actually conservation -- of resources, living space, and the balance of nature -- or is the issue control of the human capital represented?

The discouragement of large families represents but one symptom of the age-old, chronic illness of interventionism. Indeed, the dangerous explosion is not population, but rather propaganda. Population control is an uncannily accurate designation for a movement whose prime focus is the fulfillment, by coercion and force, of an insidiously antifamily philosophy.

The march of the state toward attainment of the power of life and death over its citizens, if unchecked, will allow no competing sovereignty on the part of individuals or families. Thus the right to bear children, as well as the very sanctity of human life, must be diligently guarded and defended.