[GarrickW]

So in a current side-project that is in the editing stage, I have a city which has very few resources at its disposal and which must keep its population from growing, lest the population outstrip the amount of resources available and all hell break loose. The setting is basically a mix of post-apocalyptic steampunk science-fantasy. I need to figure out a way to control the population that is at least mostly realistic, but it has to be an absolute method that does not allow for people to secretly have more children on the side.

The initial idea was to place birth control chemicals in the water supply, and only withdraw these for a short timeframe once every several years. However, there are a few problems with this. First, is there a kind of birth-control that works on both men and women without causing sterility? If not, what happens if a person of one sex regularly consumes the birth control of the opposite sex? Would this lead to unpleasant complications?

Second, let's say that this birth control is removed for two months at a time. What happens to women who get pregnant during these two months start taking the birth control again before their pregnancy is up?

This idea seemed good at first, but now that I think of it more, it seems rather awkward. What alternatives are there?

There could various other ways to go about this - perhaps every male child could be vasectomized at birth, except the generations born every seven years or so, who are then operated after having had two children. Or I could have everybody above a certain age (like 40) be forcibly euthanised. Or I could just have every "surplus" baby "disposed of" after birth. I don't know; does anybody have any ideas, or know of any that have been used in science fiction or fantasy before?

The problem is, I'm trying to make this city seem like decent people trying to do their best to survive in spite of their society teetering on the brink of extinction; not like a totalitarian state where life means nothing and people are just composted when they loose their utility. So I need to find a system that is relatively humane (given the circumstances), which is what makes me shy away from the babies-in-the-garbage or the Logan's Run scenario. Can anyone offer advice?

[hippokrene]

”First, is there a kind of birth-control that works on both men and women without causing sterility?”

Birth control doesn’t have to work on both men and women. If you’ve managed to sterilize all the men, the fact that your women are still fertile won’t matter.

That said, no. You’d need different chemicals/procedures if you wanted to stop conception in both men and women.

”If not, what happens if a person of one sex regularly consumes the birth control of the opposite sex? Would this lead to unpleasant complications?”

In the real world, most likely. The majority of chemical birth control for women is synthetic progestogen. A man or boy would regularly ingested this would develop feminine features (eg, breasts) while a girl would begin menstruating early.

There are currently no male contraceptive pills available, so we don’t know what effect they’d have on women.

”Second, let's say that this birth control is removed for two months at a time. What happens to women who get pregnant during these two months start taking the birth control again before their pregnancy is up?”

Possibly nothing. For obvious reasons, no one has run clinical studies on pregnant women to see what the effect would be. The majority of women should have normal pregnancies, but if you wanted to increase the likelihood of miscarriages or premature birth, that’s a valid choice.

”This idea seemed good at first, but now that I think of it more, it seems rather awkward. What alternatives are there?”

There’s no such thing as a realistic, non-awkward way of ensuring infertility in a large population. However, I’d point out that anything you put in the water isn’t only going to be consumed by humans. Any mammal that drinks this water might have problems with infertility, and that’s going to affect food sources. Moreover, people will figure out what’s going on. A society sophisticated enough to create and produce this chemical will also be sophisticated enough to produce a water filter to remove it or chemical to neutralize it.

” The problem is, I'm trying to make this city seem like decent people trying to do their best to survive in spite of their society teetering on the brink of extinction; not like a totalitarian state where life means nothing and people are just composted when they loose their utility. So I need to find a system that is relatively humane (given the circumstances), which is what makes me shy away from the babies-in-the-garbage or the Logan's Run scenario. Can anyone offer advice?”

Whether your reader views what the residents do as unpleasant necessity or inhuman cruelty has to do with how you present the environment and the culture.

As for the method itself, it would help to know why it’s so important the population is kept under control, how big the population is, and how sophisticated the technology is.

Example 1: In New Cairo, regular citizens live outside the arcology while plus citizens live inside of it. The quality of living outside the arcology is low – food is difficult to obtain, as is medical care, or education. The population will suffer from disease and malnutrition so the average lifespan will be very low. The arcology itself is a closed system with, contraceptive nanite populations introduced into the air to make sure women cannot conceive. Once in her lifetime, a woman can choose to have a child. Doctors take an egg from her and a semen sample from the donor of her choice, combine it in a test tube, give her a shot to increase her fertility, and place the healthy fetus within her, thus ensuring a pregnancy.

Example 2: In the city of Tulimate, all male infants have the mark of Koyrik branded on their face, which makes them sterile. Any adolescent or adult male found without that brand is executed, while any male child is promptly branded and taken from his parents. Every year, a great athletic event is held, and the winners receive a blessing that ends their sterility.

[GarrickW]

Thanks for the reply, Hippo!

The city is relatively small, we're talking about a population of a few thousand people with access to just enough food to get by grown in advanced greenhouses; the various cultivars were all genetically modified to maximum yield and minimum resource consumption. The technology is a result of society collapsing on Earth around the year 2100 following a nuclear war, and then spending another 250 years in intellectual and scientific stagnation and slow decay because the few remaining people are too occupied with subsistence to dedicate resources to science, and hardly have the resources to keep their cities in good repair, let along build anything new.

People live in cities either in the mountains or in the sky (built before the nuclear war by visionaries) which are slowly and inescapably falling into disrepair; a deadly, believed to be incurable mutant plague that exists symbiotically with many species of tree keeps people from colonizing the rest of the world again, as when they do so they invariably die of the disease.

(Perhaps you are thinking that they could just obliterate large sections of wildlife at a time and wall them off to keep the disease vectors out; plans to do exactly this are part of the plot, as one of the sky-cities has decided to start dumping specially-tailored defoliating toxins onto the surface which agricultural crops are genetically engineered to resist.)

The population lives on a permanent state of rationning, and for the most part technology is crude, though a small amount of high technology still exists and is kept in cases of emergency, or for special situations. Such things include the energy source for the cities and the engines that keep them afloat, as well as equipment for advanced medical sciences, potentially including the production of some method of birth control. Multi-purpose, powerful nanotechnology was developped shortly before the War, but is not available to the city dwellers at the start of the story.

In the real world, most likely. The majority of chemical birth control for women is synthetic progestogen. A man or boy would regularly ingested this would develop feminine features (eg, breasts) while a girl would begin menstruating early.

This is what I was afraid of, as well; that essentially makes a chemical solution like this not believable.

There’s no such thing as a realistic, non-awkward way of ensuring infertility in a large population. However, I’d point out that anything you put in the water isn’t only going to be consumed by humans. Any mammal that drinks this water might have problems with infertility, and that’s going to affect food sources. Moreover, people will figure out what’s going on. A society sophisticated enough to create and produce this chemical will also be sophisticated enough to produce a water filter to remove it or chemical to neutralize it.
Granted, every system will have its hassles. The people are fully aware that they are being kept infertile most of their lives, however, and as a society they understand that if they have children whenever they want, their resources will be consumed too quickly and there will be nothing left to do besides either dying or "removing" parts of the population. The problem is that individuals might think themselves special and try to circumvent the rules, and this is actually not at all what the story is about, so I want to present a system that seems complete and doesn't distract the reader wondering about non-existant subplots.

I might write a sequel, and so I suppose I could turn it into a subplot later, but I'd rather not. Also, individuals are generally not well educated beyond what is needed to perform basic, specific tasks, so the only people with the ability to counter such chemicals or other measures would be the handful whose job it is to produce them in the first place, who are accorded great privileges and recognition because of their status as the best-educated scientists of society.

Perhaps a long-term sterilising compound might be given to pubescent girls at the same time as a vaccination against some other disease, one that wears off after ten years - providing them with a window for childbearing - and is then reapplied in a stronger dosage after the first or second child-bearing, rendering the woman permanently infertile. Would that make sense?

[kmtolan]

I think you're getting too mired in your details. If this includes steam-punk, then obviously we're not talking hard SF here. You simply have to mention something in the water that suppresses female ovulation or renders males impotent - until a counter-agent is applied (there is your control) and that should be that.

Now, if you want a more dramatic answer - games or deliberately continued gang warfare. In other words, something that culls the young male populations.

See? Easy.

Kerry

[Aurian]

Or perhaps have something that "culls" the weaker members of the population, ensuring that only the fittest and heathiest survive?

Be it some form of virus in the water that a healthy immune system can fight off indefinately, but is fatal when the immune system is weakened through high stress, malnutrition, injury...

Or some genetically engineered or clockwork creatures that pick off the careless or unwary...

Or even a selection of the weakest percentage of the population every 7 years to ensure that the population is kept small and fit.

[Jennifer P]

Okay, here's some suggestions:

1. Promoting homosexuality. If the culture pushes people into same sex relationships, then there will be few children born. Heterosexual activity could be marginalized into something you 'Have to do to have a child'.

2. Reducing the number of female offspring, either by selective abortion, selective infanticide or by encouraging couples to use artificial insemination and then selecting more androsperm than gynosperm to produce the resulting embryos.

3. Raising the legal age of marriage into the twenties, thus reducing the number of children each woman can produce.

4. Removing adults from the breeding pool by means of cultural celibacy...the convent/monastery method. An interesting variant on this is familial polyandry, practiced by a Tibetan tribe that has *very* limited resources...in this system, selected women marry all of the male children in a family. The remaining women become nuns. This is generally achieved by making celibacy a desirable state (It does not *have* to be religion, it could be seen as 'Doing the right thing by the city').

[MrBF1V3]

Depending on how post-apocalyptic your story is, and from what level mankind has fallen. Usually some bits and pieces of the old technology is available to a select few. You could possibly use nanobots--or perhaps for this purpose you could call them nano-chaperones--with or without the subject's knowledge. Also, they could be programmed, for example; 'one and only one, etc'.

Of course it seems like someone somewhere would find a way to hack into nanobots and change their programming, but that's another story.

B5

[Fung Koo]

I think your setting alone provides the rationale for a socially controlled population.

External measures of control (chemical, nano, etc) being forced onto the citizenry is a 100% guarantee of a rebellion movement, even if mot people agree with it. You will have a hard time convincing your post-Civil Rights readership that any society would willingly submit to forced birth control. People barely believe that even China pulls off what it does (and it barely does at that). But China is where you need to look -- they've convinced most of the population to buy into the birth control measures, and it's embedded lots of bizarre (and not-so bizarre) side of effects -- like the culling of female children (which you'd probably find in your society -- one man can make a thousand women pregnant, but a thousand men can still only get one woman pregnant at a time).

It is far more believable, and much easier, to simply have the total culture -- including religion, politics, and media -- be based on population limitation as the sensible and right thing to do. A bottom-up approach, rather than top-down.

If it is widely known that there is not much food, and the society has been on rations for all of living memory, then simply having a core more/value of that society being "don't take more than your fair share" would make birthing extra children a social sin. If the religion was based on sharing, too, then it would be a sacred sin. And if the media was sympathetic (free, civilian media will tend to focus on the plight of people who have been wronged by those who do not follow the rules [think of homeless people and the crap they get for stealing food, yet how else are they to survive?]), then your message is fully reinforced.

The population would thus control themselves because constant and totalized food rationing would mean infant death rates would be sky-high anyway. If there's barely enough food to feed the adults, adding babies is a difficult choice already. Adding a superfluous mouth to your family would reduce everyone's food, increasing risk of disease and illness in that whole family. Having two children at once would make two weak adults, rather than one strong adult. Your neighbours would not want a dirty neighbour harbouring disease and moral inferiority next door, either.

You can be sure your neighbour would call the media on the event of the birthing of twins -- it would be an interesting point to have people acting charitably toward multiple-births as an act of compassion on the one hand, and the corresponding anti-movement that would see the twins killed as an abomination and detriment to society (plus, twins limit the total gene pool). Those who then chose to have a second child would occupy more evil moral space, because they are deliberately and knowingly weakening the human race.

There's also the question then of the infirm, the unemployed, and the homeless. Do these people get food? Or is their access to food controlled by their productivity? I suspect the people would be split into two opposing views. One would give charitably pf their own rations, and the other would see those people AND the charity as contributing to the further demise of society.

You'd end up with quite an austere society. Certainly some would question the broader moral issue of globalized birth control, but if inculcated into the very basic morality of the society the arguments against it would not go far. Especially because the consequences of overpopulation would be immediately obvious starvation.

I'd include a detail that at some point a dynasty comes into power that promotes open child birth, which would inevitably lead to the demise of that dynasty as it is simply unsupportable by the reality of their situation. That being said, though, there's the seed for your conflict. No doubt the argument of such a dynasty would be that the lord said go forth and populate the earth to bring the earth under the will of man. Some lingering vestigial belief in such a concept would no doubt exist and crop up every so often, to the detriment of all.

No need to invent fancy science to keep people from having babies when they'll inevitably do it themselves.

It would be tense, though. With infant mortality so high, the push would be to have more babies. But the social value would mean that you would wait to see if the child would survive beyond X years before trying again.

As a post-apoc story, your affluent people would be the likeliest survivors, too. And you'll note that in most western nations, the affluent have a negative birthrate already. White people in particular are not replacing themselves. So it's not really a far stretch for that same lack of emphasis on reproduction to continue through to the aftermath of an apocalypse that limited a possibility of reproductive behaviour that the people before weren't really taking advantage of anyway...

EDIT: Oh, and a post-nuclear apocalypse would mean that sterility was prevalent, anyway. And mutant babies. I'd look at Wyndham's "Chrysalids" for some ideas.

[Magister Ludi]

I'm thinking something like the Youth Anti-Sex League (from 1984) where "patriotic citizens" eschew and denounce sex as an anti-social activity. Perhaps the society limits the amount of exposure and interaction between young people of the opposite sex. How powerful (and draconian) are the authorities?

[shashekar]

Two word solution: Kinetic weapons.