Multiple Births

Re “Iowa Seven, Houston Eight: a Difference,” Column Left, Dec. 29: Unlike Robert Scheer, I do think there is a reasonable way to regulate multiple births: through taxation. We subsidize childbearing under the current tax code that creates perverse incentives. A prudent policy would neither subsidize nor penalize families with two children. But when zero-population-growth levels are exceeded, the tax man should come knocking and the financial penalty should rise steeply with each additional birth.

Why? Because those additional humans will add to the strain on the world’s resources, which cannot adequately support the 6 billion people already here--2 billion of whom now go hungry or are on the verge of starvation, according to a U.N. report released in October.

When a family chooses to have eight children, it is allowed to push the social costs of overcrowding onto the more responsible people who have fewer. This is exacerbated when people go forward with extreme pregnancies, the costs of which they in no way can afford themselves.

CHRIS FORD

Los Angeles