Not so. First of all, each family is in the best position to decide whether it has enough food for enough children. If each family has the freedom and the means to make that determination, then all of them will have the means to choose their family size, and the means to support their kids.
Secondly, governments have other reasons for coercively limiting childbearing: the usual reason is not hunger, but the numerical limitation of a socially or politically disfavored subgroup.
If the population is growing fast while being self-sufficient and productive, it's beneficial to a totalitarian government to keep it growing -- more economic power, more bodies to staff the military and police. In Soviet-era Romania, when people stopped reproducing because they were so miserable, the communist government implemented coercive population *increase* measures...
Thanks, you just made another good point for my argument: government do not have to coerce miserable, starving people into limiting their childbearing.
" -- people were thrown out of their homes and lost their jobs if they didn't produce babies. Women were forced to undergo gynecological exams to see if there was some reason they weren't getting pregnant -- if they were discovered to have been using contraceptives, the home and job were history. If they were found to have blocked tubes or some such treatable fertility problem, they were forced to undergo treatment for it whether they wanted to or not. "
More evils of coercive government family planning. No argument from me there.
"My point was that it's important to promote a culture in which people don't think it's okay to just keep popping out babies, regardless of ability to support them."
This is a rather stupid sereotype. If people have the liberty to self-manage both their productive and their reproductive activities, self-interest will strongly incline them to have the number of children they desire and can care for.
This is a strong point in favor of liberty, not government coercion, whether pro-natalist or anti-natalist.
Reality check: We have a huge and growing segment of the population here in the US that continues to pop out babies that they have no means or intention of supporting. That's why my NYC apartment is surrounded by massive public housing towers, filled with people who can't pay their own rent, can't pay for their own food, and can't pay for their own basic medical care, and keep popping out babies anyway. Then they use the babies as hostages to extract ever larger amounts of money from the productive segment of the population. This is unsustainable, and if we let it continue, you can be sure that eventually coercive population control measures will happen in the US.
In many third world countries, parents who are suffering from malnutrition themselves, and have already had some children die of malnutrition and still have others who are in imminent danger of dying of malnutrition, keep right on having more babies anyway. In quite a few countries, selling children when they're 7/8/9 years old is a common solution for these families. They get $50-$100 bucks for a pretty little 8 year old girl sold to a brothel, where she will chained to a bed and be raped dozens of times a day. Little boys are sometimes sold into sexual slavery as well, though more often they're sold into other types of labor slavery. Most will never see their families again. And the families can't even afford to care.
In India, there is a common phenomenon of dumping elderly members of a household when there's not enough food to keep feeding them and the ever-growing number of children. Literally dumping, on roadsides, under bridges, on the outskirts of cities. There are charity groups that try to pick up as many of these dumped people as they can, and scrape together a little food and medicine for them. But there are way too many for the financially strapped charity groups to handle, and a lot just die where they were dumped. Sorry grandpa, now that our seventh baby has arrived we're going to have to dump you. Really. This is happening right now.
No, people do not just naturally limit their child-bearing to the number they can afford to support. Well-educated people generally do. Illiterate people who grew up in illiterate homes generally don't.
Secondly, governments have other reasons for coercively limiting childbearing: the usual reason is not hunger, but the numerical limitation of a socially or politically disfavored subgroup.
That's a completely separate issue (and much less common) from the sort of coercive population control that's going on in VietNam and China. These are across the board programs -- not limited to people with specific religious beliefs, or specific political beliefs, or specific ethnicity. The government knows the only way that it can even marginally improve the statndard of living is by drastically reducing population growth. And the sad thing is, it works. The standard of living in China has improved dramatically in the decades since the strict and extremely coercive population control program began. Literacy is way up, lifespan is way up, everything is way up. And interestingly, the side effect of *reaching* this higher standard of living, is that a politically significant number of Chinese citizens can now afford to think about things like freedom and do something about, with the result that capitalism is emerging and organized opposition to specific government activities is emerging. And there is very little opposition to the population control progran.
It's really sad that people don't just self-limit their child-bearing. It even sadder that "conservatives" are incessantly insisting there's no reason for anyone to limit their child-bearing. Just get a marriage license from the government, and start popping them out. Let God worry about how they'll get fed. Only somehow it always ends up that either they just don't get fed (the norm in third world countries) or other people who are productive and do limit their child-bearing get forced by government to pay to support all these other people's children (the norm in developed countries).