I am a PhD student at SFU, Canada and I worked in Romania for a long time, trying to help children who were victims of abandonment of parents who just kept on having children one after the other and then, leaving them in front of the door of the orphanage. I have also worked with abused children from different institutions. Unfortunately I have encountered a huge number of parents who make the biggest mistakes… some of them, our friends… I am not talking about abuse, but just rookie mistakes which are not seen as dangerous. Parents have no idea about the effects of their deeds have on their children…
I could go on and on, but I stop. Kyle, if you are interested in collaborating on this one, please contact me by email. By the way I am a mother of two

So, it seems to me that developed countries in fact don’t need breeding licenses (or a limit to the number of children allowed) to prevent overpopulation! The places where it’s necessary tend to be poor, undereducated third-world countries, which are unlikely to be capable of maintaining a good breeding control program (without resorting to heavy repression and unacceptable methods).

The solution seems to be to encourage development of the ‘third world’, as well as to better integrate immigrant populations originating from these countries, and the problem will solve itself without the need for increased restrictions – with higher standards of living and better education, growth rates will drop close to today’s first-world levels.

Regulation for the sake of ensuring quality parenting is another matter, of course. It’s something I never considered, but the idea does seem to have merit. Managed properly, the results could be impressive, but a great deal of thought needs to be put in how to ensure that regulation isn’t too rigid and restrictive, leading to more than a few good parents not having parenthood rights due to the failings of the system.
Very thorough checks need to be done in order to deny reproductive rights; the denial needs to be *temporary* in case the prospective parents mature / get better; and care needs to be taken where unlicensed parenthood is concerned – said parents need to be allowed to keep their child should they be found to satisfy the necessary minimum requirements.

I don’t see why people think the full system (in which a parental license is required) would be too hard to implement. You could say, e.g., that someone who has kids without a parenting license will be subject to regular scrutiny by social workers, health-care professionals, etc., and that the kids will be moved to protective custody if these parents don’t meet certain standards.

One problem I have with LaFollette’s reasoning is that in his analogies (e.g., with getting a license to drive or fly a plane, or with getting the certification needed to practice law or medicine), it’s possible to observe the person doing the thing for which they seek a license. For instance, one can get enough observation of someone driving or flying or interning before deciding whether they’re good enough at that activity to warrant having a license to do it. But it’s hard to see how one could get enough observations of someone’s parenting abilities before they become a parent. We can’t give them some test kids and observe them raising those kids for 3 years (say) before saying, “You passed the test, here’s your license.” Instead, it’s better to keep our current system, where the default is that you’re allowed to have kids but they’ll be taken away if you show that you’re incapable of being a responsible parent.

Re. the adoption analogy: As someone pointed out (above), if you prohibit someone from reproducing, you’re saying that their parenting skills are so poor that the possible child is better off never existing. But if you prohibit someone from adopting, you’re saying, instead, that the person’s parenting skills are so poor that the actual child is better off existing elsewhere (in foster care or with different adoptive parents). Clearly, the screening standards for making the latter decision should be much more demanding than the standards for the former decision.

And seriously while adoptive parents generally are good – what about the ones who abuse or kill their children? It happens far more often than you would expect given the hoops they go through, but there are unethical agencies etc out there who can ‘miss’ the obvious signs providing the money is there.

There are also serious issues for adoptees like lack of current, indepth family health history that does not end when the adoption occurs but continues to evolve and expand over time. When a parent places they are young and haven’t faced the health issues of the future and quite likely their parents are still alive and healthy as well – see the dilemna on having a health history that is 50+ years out of date?

Really bad idea. Why not simply spend all the money spent on licensing on education and access to birth control?