Child License

[Leto]

Havoc, your initial post reminded me of Jacob quite a lot. It's a good thing. C:

As for the licence matter, we have enough rules governing our life at the moment, why make more?

[Rich]

So you make it illegal for people to have kids without a licence. Is that actually going to make any significant difference?

You can't hide pregnancy forever, eventually someone would catch on and alert the appropriate 'child-busting' authority.

[ANN NEELY]

I've been considering the whole Child License business myself....
Some people just aren't meant to be parents. I remember that this woman was out on the town getting drunk.
12 hours later, she calls the police for a ride home because she left her nine year-old daughter home alone for 12 hours! She was arrested for child abandonment, and this was her argument:
"She's old enough to be home alone; she's practically old enough to have a baby now!"
What an idiot....

[TomFrogman]

Although I agree that many people just arent fit to be parents, a child license would only be a good idea if it werent too difficult to obtain a license or the criteria wasn't too discriminating (or rather, 'picky'). But in such a case, licenses would most likely be handed out just as freely as drivers licenses and we all know how many terrible drivers there are in the world.

In the end, would it really make much of a difference? We have drivers licenses and terrible drivers. We have laws against underaged drinking and smoking. It happens. If we pass a law on Child Licenses, I have no doubt they'll be handed out all too frequently, defeating the purpose. It'll just be a slight inconvenience to sign the forms.

[Facsimile]

Even someone who abstains can become pregnant from, for example, rape. So should they be punished for something that wasn't even their fault?

Why would they be punished? I don't see how aborting a 'rape baby' is a bad thing...

I like the Child Licence idea. Obviously it would need a lot more thought put into it, but that would be for the authorities to decide.