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There are a number of variations on this. Sometimes every couple is allowed a fixed number (frequently two); other times, the number allowed is tradable, luck-based, or determined by some kind of eugenic principle (parenting skills are less commonly judged). Enforcement methods may range from punitive taxes on extra children, through mandated birth control and sterilization upon the birth of the last child allowed, to outright killing of excess population.
These dystopias always seem to assume stable long term marriages, they usually offer some number of children per couple. Second marriages are ignored.
Only very rarely does it actually work. Often it signals a descent into [[Dystopia]]. It's also very common for the protagonist to be a child who exceeds the population cap.
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* In ''[[Scrapped Princess]]'', the entire world is allowed to have only so many human residents; when the population gets too big, the excesses are killed off by the Peacemakers.
* A major theme in ''[[Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann]]'', where this is practiced in villages, planets and entire universes.
* Inverted in [[Gundam Seed]] where the Coordinators'
== [[Film]] ==
* The movie ''[[
* ''Child Reduction Act''. Families with more than one child must either pay a tax on the extras or send them to concentration camps.
* ''Z.P.G.''. All parents are forbidden from having children for one generation (30 years). The penalty for violation is death.
* ''The Last Child''. Each U.S. couple is only allowed to have one child. If the first child dies they can't have another.
* Mentioned in the opening expository voice-over in ''[[
* In Paul Verhoeven's adaptation of ''[[Starship Troopers]]'', one of the female infantry recruits says that she joined because she wants to have babies, and it's easier to get a license if you're a citizen.
* In ''[[Supernova]]'', despite the fact that there are multiple colonized planets, a couple on the ship still has to obtain a license to have a child.
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== [[Literature]] ==
* ''[[Stand On Zanzibar]]'' by [[John Brunner]] has eugenically-based population control, with incredibly strict genetic screening requirements (e.g., people who carry color-blindness genes or genes correlated with schizophrenia are not allowed to have children).
** The title comes from the idea that, if you gave everybody on Earth something like two or three square feet, at the time of the story's start, they would just fit onto the island of Zanzibar. Even with the above, by the story's end, humanity would be well into the waters off Zanzibar...
* In the ''[[Known Space]]'' series by [[Larry Niven]] the number of children you can have is based on several factors: you can be assigned children based on a fixed metric, buy licenses for extra children, or even win them in a lottery (this last is the result of alien influence by a species that's attempting to breed [[Born Lucky|psychic luck powers into humanity]]). At one point there are even legalized gladiatorial death duels for birthrights, winner take all. The ARM police go on "mother hunts" for those who illegally went over their reproductive limits, and very rare individuals are awarded an unlimited breeding
** In another Niven verse, ''A World Out Of Time'', the State has become a [[One World Order]] where [[Individuality Is Illegal]], and only massive fusion-powered desalinators on every shoreline can provide enough fresh water for the massive population. A few generations back, the State instituted compulsory sterilization for all those with harmful genes, both for eugenic reasons, to save money on heath care, and to slow the rapid population growth. No wonder they're so desperate to [[Terraform]].
* ''[[Ender's Game]]'' has a two-child limit enforced by punitive taxation. However, because Earth is governed by a somewhat weak version of [[The Federation]], certain individual jurisdictions, particularly predominantly-Catholic ones, seem to have lax enforcement policies. Ender is a state-sponsored exception as his parents were supposed to breed a fleet-commanding prodigy and his older siblings turned out to be a sociopath and a pacifist.
* In ''[[Red Mars Trilogy|Green Mars]]'', one character proposes to fight overpopulation by giving everyone the tradable birthright to three-quarters of a child. (That is, each couple has the right to 1.5 children; they can then buy or sell half-children to get the number they want and can afford.) This doesn't ever get implemented, though.
* ''[[I Will Fear No Evil]]'' by [[Robert A. Heinlein]] has population
** It also appears in ''[[Time
** In ''[[Podkayne
* ''The [[Shadow Children]] Sequence'' by Margaret Haddix is a series about a world where families can only have 2 children (the main character is, of course, a secret third child).
* Lisa Mason's future in her book ''Summer of Love'' has a lottery for who can and cannot have children, but include the concept of "skip-children", where frustrated parents can put their combined DNA in a bank to be born decades or centuries later, to be raised by a descendant.
* In ''[[Animorphs
* ''Carnival'' by Elizabeth Bear has an AI that determines the maximum stable population of Earth and selects people to be killed whenever it is exceeded.
* [[Lois McMaster Bujold]]'s [[Vorkosigan Saga]] has many different planets, using different methods:
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* Families in ''[[The Giver]]'' by Lois Lowry are allowed one male and one female child. They can choose how they space the children - it's all adoption, anyway. And if a child dies, then the parents can apply (or maybe are just given) another child of the same gender, [[Individuality Is Illegal|with the same name.]] Not to mention that if any child is "defective" they are [[Released to Elsewhere]]. Yeah, it's a little creepy.
* In ''2061'' by Arthur C. Clarke it's explained that the one-child policy of China was eventually replaced by one where a person can have two children for free but any additional children cost a prohibitively-expensive fee which doubled with every additional child; one character, Sir Lawrence Tsung, is a multimillionaire who was able to afford to have ten children (his ninth child, William Tsung, has a shuttle craft named after him).
* In the [[
* In David Brin's [[Uplift]] universe, all reproduction has to be carefully screened, both as population control and as a prerequisite to joining the Galactic civilization. Probationers are those who
* A short story 'The Sliced-Crosswise Only-on-Tuesday World' by [[Philip Jose Farmer]], involves a world so overcrowded that it couldn't support more than a seventh of humanity; so [[Human Popsicle]] technology was perfected, allowing for each person to be awake only one day out of each week. The story had a [[Downer Ending]], after working hard to get on the same day with a woman he's [[Dude, She's Like, in
** Later expanded into the Dayworld series of novels.
* In Larry Niven's and Steven Barnes's ''Saturn's Race'', the world discovered that a vaccine distributed throughout the third world nations twenty years prior had the deliberate side-effect of causing sterility in the children born to the inoculated.
* In The Declaration by Gemma Malley, people who have signed the Declaration are not allowed to have children. That doesn't stop them, though, and the kids end up in Surplus Halls, [[Fate Worse Than Death|or worse]].
* ''The Bladerunner'' ([[Blade Runner|no relation]]) by Alan Nourse had the government require sterilization as the price of medical treatment. A "bladerunner" was someone who smuggled surgical tools for doctors willing to perform unauthorized medicine (doctors weren't permitted to take medical equipment out of the hospitals).
* A variation of this based on gender is put out in [[The Dark Elf Trilogy]]. (See the [[Forgotten Realms]] entry below, as these books are the ones that defined those rules.) The main character (who has since become [[Trope Namer|well]] [[Drizzt Syndrome|known]]) was, incidentally, a third son.
* In ''Inside Out'' by Maria V Snyder, the population is divided into two castes, the Uppers and the scrubs. Scrubs are encouraged to have as many children as possible and are denied birth control. Men and children who break the rules are executed, but fertile women who commit infractions become "breeders", kept chained down and constantly pregnant until their bodies give out from the strain. Uppers, on the other hand, are allowed one child per couple. If there's an accident with their birth control, the extra child is dyed to look like the scrubs' ethnicity and given to a scrub foster mother. The overlords use this to foster class division, telling the scrubs that the Uppers are spoiled rotten and telling the Uppers that the scrubs are too lazy and selfish to use birth control despite their overpopulation.
* In Mikhail Akhmanov and Christopher Nicholas Gilmore's novel ''Captain French, or the Quest for Paradise'', all colonies impose birth licensing policies once they reach a certain population density. While there are plenty of dystopian governments, even the nice ones do it. There is a group of women, whom the titular space trader nicknames "the Frantic Mothers", whose goal in life seems to be to bear as many children as possible, regardless of who the fathers are. They will do anything to move to a new colony that encourages this sort of behavior, including paying for passage with sex (preferably with a fertile male, for obvious reasons). Since the protagonist had himself sterilized (completely reversible), the Frantic Mothers are a little disappointed in him. Since most humans in this universe undergo a procedure that stops aging, it is possible for the same woman to be the progenitor of several colonies (imagine how many babies she can make in several centuries).
* In ''[[
* In the [[Uglies]]-verse, parents are prohibited, and also incapable because of the whole [[Buffy-Speak|pretty-mind-thing]], of having more than one child every ten years. This keeps the pretty parents able to focus on one child, and keeps sibling bonds from forming. It's surprisingly effective.
* In Cyril Kornbluth's horrifying dystopia ''Shark Ship,'' the ocean-dwellers have a two-child limit (with officers of the ships forbidden children altogether for fear of nepotism.) {{spoiler|It turns out that the land-dwellers implemented a one-child policy, and this, together with their glorification of violence and torture, has effectively provided a solution to the problem of overpopulation. A Final Solution, as it were.}}
* [[
== [[Live Action TV]] ==
* ''[[
* On one of the worlds the ''[[
* ''[[Star Trek:
* ''The Last Child'' was a mediocre TV Movie set in the near future when couples were limited to only one child, even if the child died before puberty.
* In the 22nd century of ''[[Terra Nova]]'' the protagonist was sentenced to six years in prison for having a third child. Fortunately they don't care about population laws in the virgin frontier of 85 million BC.
* Inverted on the new ''Battlestar Galactica'', in which the possibility that couples' reproduction might have to be made ''mandatory'' in order to sustain a decimated human species was broached soon after the destruction of the Colonies.
== [[Tabletop RPG
* The Drow families in ''[[Forgotten Realms]]'' are only allowed two sons at any one time, though they can have as many daughters as they like. They sacrifice the third to Lolth. Unless one of them conveniently dies beforehand. Drizzt Do'Urden was the third child of his family, but one of his brothers was assassinated shortly after his birth, so they didn't have to sacrifice him. This tradition exists because Lolth herself demands it. She has...issues...with men, to put it lightly.
** Inverted in another dark elf example, from the old Role Aids third-party D&D supplement line: In ''Elves'', dark elf society is virtually lawless, except that it's prohibited to kill a female dark elf before she's produced at least two offspring. Backstabbing and feuding would probably wipe out their population if not for this rule.
== [[Video Games]] ==
* In ''[[Mass Effect]]'', the Quarian Migrant Fleet has to keep tight control of its population due to the limited resources. Tali mentions that they're currently running a one child policy, but also that the limit changes depending on the population and available resources and that there have even been some periods when the population dropped far enough that positive population control was used.
** Additionally, the Turians and Salarians forced this upon [[Explosive Breeder|the Krogan]] via the [[Depopulation Bomb|Genophage]].
* The population of the {{spoiler|Kaka clan}} in ''[[
* The Combine from [[Half Life|HalfLife 2]] are more thorough and have a no child per family policy, enforced by suppression fields.
== [[Web Comics]] ==
* In ''[[
* A variation in ''[[Dan and
* The [[Big Bad]] emperor of ''[[Red All Over]]'' orders every third child to be killed upon birth (and by draftees, no less).
== [[Real Life]] ==
* China's one-child policy, although there are ''many'' loopholes.
* Nazi Germany had a variation as well. "Pure" Aryans were encouraged to have as many children as possible, and birth control was outlawed. "Undesirables," including those of other races and the mentally handicapped would be forcibly sterilized or killed.
* Rather violently inverted in Romania under communist rule. President Nicolae Ceauşescu outlawed abortion, birth control and sex education, and instituted a 'celibacy tax' for women who failed to have children, with the goal of increasing the country's population. It worked, but [[It Got Worse|it didn't end well. The generation he created turned out to be the one that overthrew him, ironically.]]
* Like the ''[[
* Partially inverted in the time of Louis the Sun King in France, when any family with ten or more children was tax-exempt in order to boost the population for more soldiers a generation down the line.
* In Vietnam during the 1960's, they had a two-child policy. It was stopped in 2003, although they are considering reviving it.
* Some regional governments in poorer parts of India have introduced the "honeymoon bonus", offering money to newlyweds who agree not to have children.
* In Russia, Vladimir Putin's government introduced financial reward schemes to encourage people to have more children. It's unclear to what extent it was responsible (probably not very much), but since then Russia's population has stabilised and is once again growing slowly.
* Inverted in the New France colony where people where given a reward to have many children.
* Likewise inverted in Fascist Italy, where women were given medals for having many babies, and soldiers were required to salute pregnant women.
* Somewhat inverted in the case of the Soviet Union, where there was a tax placed on being a bachelor. While it is not explicitly a pro-birth measure, the implication was that it would lead to more births.
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