Just as some people are ill-suited as gardeners or engineers, others are particularly ill-suited as parents. Parenting should be a licensed privilege, at least as much as driving a vehicle requires a license. Children have no defense against violent or neglectful or ill-suited parents.
Over population may become a large problem for earth's future, to combat this it may be necessary to actively control the population. Much like governments mandating vaccines to provide herd immunity to all the constituents, denying birth may be required to make earth sustainable.
Historically the usage of power over childbirth on citizens has been used negatively more often than not. Forced sterilization of homosexuals, forced abortions etc.. This is a subject with many pitfalls and needs to handled with the utmost care.
sources:
Eugenic program in the U.S and Germany.
Forced abortions in China.
Mentally ill people are incapable of taking care of children properly, if at all. These people should not be allowed to place extra burden on society, the foster system, and their own children.
who or what would form the basis for determining who is able to reproduce. would it be based upon physical or mental superiority, or a combination of both? even then, what would determine the superiority of the aforementioned traits?
It would be morally hazardous to try and determine what circumstances people are either permitted or denied the privilege of having offspring. Running the risk of a kind of 'cleansing' of undesirables by those making the decisions.
Until the last foster child is adopted and the last hungry belly fed, nobody anywhere should have the right to have children. The problem of too many natural resources and too few people to exploit them was solved long long ago.
This would be difficult to regulate or determine. Regardless of who is chosen to be acceptable for having children, there can still always be a danger of birth defects.
It is implied that some form of government would be removing the right to have children. However, it is not the government's right to restrict rights, only guarantee them, among those the right to happiness. Children may make them happy, and so denying them would go against one of their rights.
Theoretically it could be a good idea for the human race, but in reality it would be very hard to define clearly who should be allowed to breed. How low must your IQ be before you are denied?
evolution was always able to take care of it.although there are cases where people should really not have gotten children, I don't think s.o. should have the right to make up the rules who is allowed to have children and who's not. period.