... or how I re-wrote my notes

Humans certainly seem to have instincts to have sex. They also have instincts to nurture and care for children. On the other hand, it's not at all clear that they have instincts to have children. That just seems to come naturally from the instinct to have sex. The point is that birth control is a moral issue because it acts to interfere with the result of an important instinct, having sex, that has been important to human survival. At the same time, historically, humans have commonly had an over population problem. It has been dealt with before. The Greeks widely practiced homosexuality and then had families later in life. This was a fairly successful method. Hopefully that doesn't make you too morally queasy because the far more common method of birth control was warfare. This was true of Asia, Europe, North America, Africa, the Middle East and Mezo-America. The Yucatan peninsula is a great example of this because the soil is poor and the porous limestone ground absorbs all surface water. This greatly limited agriculture, but they still managed to build agriculturally based civilizations. Famine was common. Warfare became constant to the point of being ritualized. Morally no group can kill their own, but they can kill the "others" and the "others" kill them in turn. Then again, some civilizations sent the excess population into slavery. This is just the way most humans in history have dealt with over-population.

It seems clear that part of humans making a transition to another, more developed ecology, will have to come up with new ways. Luckily we have, in the form of various methods called birth control that mostly work by preventing fertilization during sex. Obviously from current population dynamics, this has not been adequate. Even if human numbers are periodically devastated by disease, as seems likely, conscious birth control becomes a necessity to survival for the same reason that disease cannot be released. The equation of technical humans is that life is too expensive to waste it.

One thing that will help is related to instincts. Humans must move from a quantity strategy to a quality strategy. Using artificial selection is part of this. The conscious knowledge though that the children are highly likely to be survivors, can reduce the pressure of the instinct to use a quantity strategy. In ways we already see this in the more developed nations.

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