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:

• sexual abstinence
• contraception
• sterilization
• abortion
• infanticide

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.