Perhaps a different way of approaching the question would be to ask: What kind of country do you want to live in?
In both cases there is risk to the individual’s life, but an army conscript is at least provided with food, clothing, and lodging.
Otherwise, they are inclined to follow the natural law: placental mammals will abort in the face of resource scarcity.
Instead, it just wants to reinforce the usual cheap trick: force women to have babies, and then make them pay.
Enforce childbirth if you wish but at least call that enforcing by what it is.
It is slavery: the claim to own and control another’s body, and to profit by that claim.
This is an edited extract from Burning Questions by Margaret Atwood, published by Chatto & Windus. »