Population control
Population control is the practice of curtailing population increase, usually by reducing the birth rate. The practice has sometimes been voluntary, as a response to poverty, or out of religious ideology, but in some times and places it has been government-mandated. This is generally done to try to prevent a believed threat of Malthusian catastrophe, or overpopulation in general.
Given the nature of human reproductive biology, controlling the birth rate generally implies one of the following practices:
An important example of mandated population control is China's one-child policy, in which having more than one child is made extremely unattractive. This has led to allegations that practices like infanticide, forced abortions and forced sterilization are used as a result of the policy.
