"- if I even put out an advertisement we both get shunned until I put her out to pasture someplace she can't bother anyone by being off. If she'd been noticed before I could give her prompts constantly I would never have met her."

"Yikes."

"Well the Amentans did -"

"- we don't hate all disabled people, she's gonna win her suit -"

"Her suit?"

"Um, the Amentans conquered Earth and are really against people having kids and one time when I had a dental problem and couldn't talk I froze up and got in someone's way and they sterilized me."

"Which they were absolutely not allowed or supposed to do," says Isama, "Klimati's gotten picked up by mental health nuisance before and never had a problem, even the time she was having too bad a day to do complete sentences - admittedly she could still answer yes or no questions when they weren't too complicated, but still -"

"...well, I'm not going to have children anyway..."

"Right, but on principle, you oughta decide that, not other people, if you can afford them."

"Why do Amentans care how many children other people have?"

"They have a complicated system for allocating them on their planet and the thing we're doing looks horrifying by comparison."

"The thing they're doing," says Ana, "is having more than they even want because they don't have reliable birth control and some of their religions forbid even unreliable birth control, and they only haven't already overwhelmed the available space on the planet because a ton of them were dying constantly, and we're fixing the dying constantly, which imposes an absolute obligation to also fix the too many children thing, but some of them find this offensive because they think it means we dislike them personally or something."

"How're you fixing it?"

"They didn't have, like, basic sanitation, antibiotics, effective quarantine measures, decent oral rehydration solutions, any modern surgical technique - even working on a different species it's better than what they had going, they're not that different."

"The too many children thing, I mean, we're trying to get people to have smaller families but not very hard and not very successfully."

"- well, we're still working on one-and-done perfect reliability stuff because you can't humanely enforce population control without that but condoms work the same for them and they're pretty good if you don't forget to use them."

"We'll take that, if you're selling it."

"You don't have birth control either?"

"No. And we've had quite enough of foreign rule but we could make sure married people can access it."

"...what, are unmarried people supposed to have kids?"

"No, definitely not, but unreliable birth control might tempt them to have sex for an overall higher birth rate - or abortion rate - than we've got now. Depends how unreliable, I guess, but no one with an ounce of sense would have premarital sex now and I worry there's a point where they would but still shouldn't."

"It's upwards of ninety-nine percent if you don't put it on wrong or get the wrong size or forget it half the time or something."

"In practice how often do people do one of those things?"

"Oh, all the time, so predictably that we don't wanna take the babies away over it, so we aren't enforcing pop control till we have better stuff for humans."

Nod. "And so we don't want to give people the idea that premarital sex is sometimes safe. 'works 99 times out of a hundred, destroys your life and afterlife the hundredth, is pretty fun' is a bad sort of options to give humans, it'll predictably ruin a lot of lives that could've gone fine."