this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2026
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I suggest that instead of age verification for kids, we do parenting verification licences for anyone wanting to have kids, before they have kids and then don't raise them.
Some might be upvoting this in cheeky irony, but I see this as a modest proposal.
This position deserves a longer form article & widespread publication, and numerous calculations & studies detailing how much more ethically beneficial this would be for society. Would it not be more efficient to curb idiocy among the masses by regulating people's choices in population control than conducting intimate mass government surveillance? Would it not be a higher ethical stance to give people the illusion of choice by making them work for the privilege of birthing, maintenance, and management of another human being?
Counterpoint: it is cheaper and cost-effective to dehumanize and control the masses with the technical advances we have today ~~, and-also, to hell with ethics~~. Think about it. If car manufacturers would be made responsible for designing cars to identify bad actors, we wouldn't have to deal with the inevitable consequences of people who gain their driving licenses but bend the rules anyway. We could do with discarding licensing altogether because it's not perfect. Only by singling out and reprimanding each person for their faults with the conviction of a Walmart micromanager and the ruthless efficiency of Palantir surveillance - can we create a more perfect bubble of safety for society.
~(I don't have time to even pretend to cough up statistics, k thx bye)~
Ah, the classic dichotomy: privacy vs eugenics
It's not eugenics if you just confiscate them at birth. This is already being done with severely unfit parents
One: that's not what was suggested. OP said parental verification/authorization before birth.
Two: you're proposing something like residential schools instead. Which, even if you don't agree constituted genocide, was still pretty bad.
I'm not advocating for our government's insane privacy-violating measures. Just pointing out that OP's proposal is worse. There's got to be better ways to protect children than "police state" or "genocide."
I cannot believe the downvoting coming your way for this.
On one - how the abuse of this cannot be foreseen by the most clueless person is beyond me.
On two - are people under the impression that the current child welfare system is adequate for the children that are currently in it? What about that system makes them think it would be suitable to increase the number of children in care.
Fucking mental.
Yeah, I almost wrote a whole counterpoint on how horrible the current child welfare system is and how nearly every trained professional agrees that breaking up families should only be the last resort in the most extreme circumstances, but I had a feeling this thread wasn't the target audience for that particular reality.
I'm not proposing anything, I'm saying that if you're a drug addict or a violent criminal, this already happens so it's not that far-fetched.
Rather than going to residential schools, these children usually go to relatives who can actually take care of them, or if that's not an option they might go to the admittedly not ideal system we already have for children whose parents are dead or just completely absent.