The world is full of people. Maybe six billion, and more on the way, inexorably. Is this good or bad or what? More people expecting better lives means more resource depletion, more pollution, more bad taste and pandering by entertainers. But it also means more SMART people working on difficult problems, coming up with smart solutions. Maybe this all balances out. Except for the lousy brain-dead TV shows.

More people don't get here by magic. They aren't brought by the stork. They aren't found under cabbage leaves. People are born. This requires acts of passion, hours of pain, years of tedious rearing and (often) failed expectations, tremendous investments of effort and money and sleeplessness.

Often, parents want to exercise some control over these onslaughts. This is called 'planned parenthood', which means that you can't just fornicate freely and expect that the results will be magically sustained like mushrooms on morning dew. So you have to be thoughtful. Hold back. Think ahead.

Unfortunately, many religious factions feel that life and death are within the province of their favorite imaginary friend(s), and that humans exercising such control somehow thwarts divine will or whatever. Well shucks, I exercise control over life and death everytime I go driving my SUV and I decide NOT to squash some ugly pedestrian or miscreant cyclist. Why should gods have all the fun?

So various sky pilots have advanced political platforms that would outlaw birth control, termination of pregnancy, and smothering noisy brats. They may have a point with that last, but there are real problems with outlawing prenatal intervention. Some of these include:

• There's a biblical injunction to 'go forth and replenish the Earth.' OK, we've done that. There's plenty of people around. We've fulfilled that contract; maybe it's time for a new contract.
• In biblical times, abortion was common, as was leaving unwanted babies out on rocks for the rats and jackals and vultures to pick at. Maybe biblical models aren't the best.
• A fetus is probably not a person. You can usually tell when a person is around - they take up space, make noise, borrow stuff from you, kick your dog, whatever. No mistaking that. But a fetus is hidden (except for grossly pregnant mothers) and generally can't bother you from a couple feet away, unlike your drunk buddy who barfs on your floor.

That last is a big point - a fetus isn't visible. In order to proclaim a fetus to be a person, with all the rights and responsibilities thereof, you have to be able to TELL just when a fetus is around.

There's an easy way to do that. Just hook up monitors on every human female of likely child-bearing years, say from ages 10 to 70. (There have actually been births to women outside that range, but they're pretty rare and those years should about cover most of the possibilities.)

So you've got these implants in all the females, and maybe some lights set into the womens' shoulders or earlobes or something. And when the lights are red, they're HOT. They're carriers. They can't do anything that might damage their cargos, like drink or smoke or hotrod or rockclimb or listen to wild music. You don't want them eating McFood either. Bad stuff. Greasy, salty, smelly, teratogenic. Ick.

Maybe you think this 'monitor' thing is going too far, any anyway you'd have a hell of a time getting all those females to submit to such treatment. But how else can you tell for sure that a fetus is around? How else can you protect that embryo's rights?

Earlier, I mentioned rights and responsibilities. You probably have a pretty good idea of the rights - life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, free speech and religion and lawyers, owning handguns, etc. But what are the responsibilities? Here are a few:

• Many rooms, elevators and vehicles have restrictions on the number of PERSONS that may occupy those spaces. A pregnant mom counts as two. Push her/them off.
• Many conveyances and attractions charge admission per PERSON. Many taxes and usage charges are similarly structured. Pregnant moms must pay extra.
• Many votes are taken by the raising of hands. Hey, pregnant moms: raise both your arms, maybe a leg too if you've got twins.
• Many religious factions require that supplicants get down on their knees to pray. Pregnant moms must arrange themselves so that their cargoes are positioned properly, even if that means lying on the floor in a foetal position. Get DOWN, mama!

Maybe we need to forget all those rules about reproduction and gestation. More people will be born anyway. Why make their arrival more difficult? They're certainly be in deep enough merde when they get here. That's inevitable too, like death and taxes and karaoke.

Which still leaves us with the questions of How Many People Are Enough? and What Do We Do When We Get There? And I'm not sure that we, humanity, collectively have usable answers. We don't really need to work on those; evolutionary dynamics and/or divine will can provide suitable solutions. Too many people, and there'll be a grand die-off, just like when too-abundant deer (because we killed off the predators) overgraze an area and their population collapses. Problem solved. Lots of scrawny, maggoty deer carcasses scattered around, though. Ick.

But people aren't deer. More deer means more dumb deer. More people means more smart people. Somebody will probably figure something out. It might be on the order of Soylent Green, but so what? Or if any deities are involved, they'll pull some hocus-pocus to deal with us one way or another. So why worry?