They can signal the larger society's support for the childbearing couple against extended family and traditional pressures for high fertility. Planners must weigh whatever coercion that may come from incentives against the coercion inherent in the status quo. The author examines the subtle and shifting line between coercive and humane incentives with realism and sensitivity. The poor are already those most burdened by their societies' pressures for large families. But any program of incentives and disincentives can and must apply equally to all.
Freedom of choice is essential in a humane, non-coercive program.
Disincentives must never be life-threatening. But freedom to choose can never mean that the individual's choices themselves are cost-free. The seeming economic advantage of children has long been a factor in high fertility. State and community incentives can bring solutions other than more childbearing to the search for economic security. The plummeting world death rate that has sustained the population explosion itself reflects the penetration of such Western cultural norms as public health and antibiotics.