Population control refers to the practice of artificially altering the rate of growth of a human population. Historically, this has been made possible by limiting the birth rate, usually by government mandate. II has been undertaken as a response to factors including high or increasing levels of poverty, environmental concerns, religious reasons, and overpopulation. The idea that population control is needed to be implemented in society dates back to 1798, when Thomas Malthus suggested it in his Essay on the Principle of Population.
In 1968, Paul Ehrlich noted in The Population Bomb that, "We must cut the cancer of population growth," and that, "if this was not done, i here would be only one other solution, namely the 'death rate solution' in which we raise the death rate through war-famine-pestilence etc." In die same year, Garrett Hardin, proposed in his landmark essay The tragedy of the Commons that society must
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