Others are talking about children's rights. There is a battle boiling about what constitutes acceptable discipline. Some people say that any type of physical discipline constitutes abuse. Some people equate love with permissiveness and wonder what happened when they wake-up with uncontrollable teens. Just because you can have children doesn't mean that you will automatically understand how to raise them.
Some people believe in the numeric approach.
They say that seven is the number of perfection so by the time the seventh child arrives they will know how to be perfect parents raising the perfect child. It seems that many parents prefer the trial and error method. Where that is the case, we need to pray hard for the first born child. There are many skills that you can learn through the method of trial and error, but children are too important to subject them to trial and error parenting. The emotional baggage some children carry through life because of trial and error parenting is too painful to talk about.