Policy of Regulating Births to Meet Social Needs

The Policy of Regulating Births to Meet Social Needs makes reproduction a matter of collective planning in the Last Men’s society. Children are born not simply to enlarge the population, but to supply individuals of a higher biological type; as they mature, they assume the roles of adults who judge themselves no longer useful and elect to leave life. The result is a society that links birth, social function, and voluntary succession across generations.

Purpose and social organization

The policy rests on the Last Men’s conviction that their species remains biologically imperfect. New individuals are therefore needed continuously, but specifically as successors capable of taking over functions from adults whose nature is considered less perfect. Birth regulation serves both population planning and a program of biological improvement: each new generation is expected to renew the society’s capacity, not merely add to its numbers.

That arrangement operates within a society of a million million citizens divided among more than a thousand nations, yet without government or laws in the sense of fixed conventions enforced by force. Social customs organize communal life, while people corresponding to lawyers and politicians study those customs and propose improvements. Proposals are submitted to the whole population in telepathic conference. The account presents regulation of procreation as part of this elaborate customary order, which assigns each citizen a function and adjusts the production of new citizens of every type to social need.

Longevity and the small number of children

The number of children remains small in relation to the immense population because individuals live for extraordinarily long periods. Although every person eventually ceases to exist, the average lifespan is close to a quarter of a million terrestrial years. A society whose adults endure for such spans cannot accommodate many children at once, even though it needs a continuing supply of successors.

The long human life cycle also slows replacement. Gestation lasts twenty years; true infancy lasts about a century, childhood continues for some centuries, and adolescence lasts a thousand years. The Last Men abandoned ectogenesis, which their predecessors had practised, because motherhood had improved sufficiently that artificial gestation was no longer considered necessary. Mothers are described as especially vigorous physically and mentally during the rare period of pregnancy. These conditions make reproduction both a long investment and a deliberately limited demographic process.

Birth, succession, and voluntary retirement

The policy depends on a regular handover between generations. As children reach maturity, they take over the work of adults judged to be less capable by comparison. Those adults, once aware that they are no longer of service, choose to retire from life. In this account, population renewal is therefore not achieved by indefinite accumulation: births introduce successors, while voluntary departures make room for them and for their functions.

The text does not describe a numerical quota, a coercive selection procedure, or a specific authority that decides who may have children. Instead, it situates reproductive regulation within a social system that coordinates procreation by need and relies on deeply established customs. The policy’s stated aim is to produce individuals of a higher type, while its social logic depends on adults relinquishing their place when they believe their usefulness has ended.

Earlier population planning and changing reproductive models

A different form of demographic control appears during humanity’s earlier settlement of Venus. Because the planet could support no more than one hundred million people tolerably, its population was planned to fall to a hundredth of its former size. Births were to remain far below deaths so that, when the time came to leave Venus, no living members of the race would be left behind. This was a migration policy directed toward a defined planetary limit and eventual departure; the Last Men’s policy instead regulates births within a continuing society to meet functional and biological needs.

Earlier reproductive customs also show that the relation between sexuality and conception changed across human species. Among the Second Men, casual sexual relations ordinarily did not produce conception unless there was a true union of minds; conception was associated with intimate communion, and psychologists developed autosuggestion to facilitate or prevent it. Their sexual culture treated casual intimacy and deeper union differently, rather than making reproduction simply follow every sexual relationship. Against that history, the Last Men’s birth policy belongs to a longer evolution in which reproduction is shaped by social ideals as well as by population constraints.