"...not zero, surely?"

"I mean, we have screening for genetic diseases, but it's purely voluntary. We do have gamete banks that select for unusually intelligent gene donors. And I guess you could argue that picking a partner based on traits you'd like to pass on to a child counts. Science fiction sometimes involves cloning historical geniuses. But...historically, every time a government has tried to do anything organized on the eugenics front, it ended with people being labeled genetically undesirable and massacred."

"- it's not necessary to massacre people just to keep them from having kids with genetic diseases!"

"Nope! Not even a little bit! I assure you none of the massacres were in the slightest based on any kind of scientific evidence." 

"Then how can you even call it eugenics, if you're just sort of - randomly killing people?"

"Oh, no, it wasn't random, it was people everybody hated." 

"Humans think being hated is a genetic disease?"

"No, unenlightened humans are really easy to convince that people they hate are genetically inferior." 

"And all your attempts at eugenics are like this, nobody's tried just sterilizing criminals and people who can't learn to read and anybody who's constantly in and out of the doctor's office without an explanatory accident and stopping there?"

"I think people have ever tried just sterilizing people but people kept getting mad about it and we're not in a constant state of population crisis." 

"Yes, I suppose you'd have fewer people threatening to burn down politicians' houses for letting criminals have babies if they don't feel like that's limiting their own access to permissions..."

"If you proposed sterilizing criminals on my planet then all your supporters would be hard-line 'I do not understand incentives or proportionality and just want to torture criminals as much as possible out of an idiotic sense of misapplied justice' types." 

"Not even Met still tortures criminals."

"I don't mean literal torture, I just mean extreme obnoxiousness." 

"Oh. I mean, sterilization is traumatic even if there was no way you were ever going to get a permission, but it's generally for eugenic purposes."

"It is widely considered not the government's business who has how many children." 

"I can see why, if every time they start caring who the next generation is they demonstrate this by murdering random people!"

"I mean it's not just that, there's also a wide sentiment that like...the government's job is to keep the country running smoothly, and poking its nose into private citizens' lives is unwelcome. We also have much stronger free speech laws than I've been able to find anywhere on Amenta." 

"- how will the country run smoothly if rape is a viable reproductive strategy and people are dropping out of the workforce to take care of their genetically diseased kids and so on?"

"...I mean, what are you gonna do, force rape victims to have abortions?" 

"- yes? I think some places find ways to do without that but here, yeah, though I think there's at least a couple granting blues who set aside permissions to give victims the next year, so they can give people a chance to get a compensatory baby with someone they choose the following spring. I guess maybe if someone were raped while they had a permission in hand they could use it on that, I'd need to look it up."

"Jeeze. I mean I figured there wouldn't be strong exceptions on account of you can lie but, like, this isn't Tapa, can't you just give the kid up for adoption?" 

"If you have a baby without a permission that gets you sterilized. I guess if you'd rather have and then give up a rapist's baby and get sterilized you could pretend you weren't raped."

"How does adoption within Calado work? Do you still get sterilized if you make arrangements to adopt out the baby before it's born, to parents who do have a permission?"

"Oh, yeah, I guess you could offer to be a surrogate after the fact, that's probably legal. If you found some sideways guys who... wanted a rape baby... and had a permission but couldn't afford a surrogate? It's probably happened at least once."