"Human societies often tried that. Well, not equating the two so much as forbidding the one without the other. It didn't work that well."

"Right, humans are a bit less - law-abiding. Well, I assume by now there's reliable birth control, yes?"

"Pretty darn. There's always freak accidents, but they're really rare at this point."

Shudder. "Maybe I'll ask the biology teams if they'll work something up for any commonly occurring species that don't have one already."

"Well, there's two problems, there's getting it to work and there's getting it universally adopted."

"That'll be a problem?"

"Yeah. I mean, generalizing from humans. Religious reasons or not understanding biology well enough to trust that it does what it's supposed to and not something else or one party wants the kid and the other doesn't and only the one has to sabotage the method - when you're emperor of the multiverse I suppose you can avoid the failure mode 'carrying it around makes you look like a prostitute and then you get arrested' -"

"...yeah, that one will not be a problem. 

It's never come up but I think sabotaging a partner's birth control would carry a stiffer sentence than murder, back home."

"Keep them in a treehouse for two weeks?..."

"Swear never to do that or anything like it again or leave the planet with an implant warning everyone you meet what you did."

"How do warning implants work?"

"Chip-loaded - I mentioned you can see if people are married, if they have the marriage blessings loaded? Similarly I can see if someone's committed a crime that warranted flagging them. I suppose they could go to a human civilization and get away without complications but we didn't realize there was a sophisticated human civilization."

"Humans, Dwarves," says Cam. "...What would happen with Sabotage Offspring?"

"I have no idea. The situation would be unprecedented in so many ways - people would be happy to adopt the child, of course..."

"I guess under this social background abortion's not a thing at all, is it?"

"Killing the baby? No - no, that would not come up."

"Comes up with humans."

"Well, we can fix that, too."

"...can you."

"I assume people are not very likely to want to kill their child if they aren't having accidental pregnancies in the first place?"

"Not nearly as likely. And good medical care can make up most of the remaining gap and good economic safety nets can make up most of the rest."

"And we can do that."

"Yep. And that will close most of the gap and that's assuming humans are the most abortion-happy species you ever meet."

"I wasn't expecting we'd get the crime rate to zero everywhere."