"That makes sense."

"Should we go through the membership requirements, figure out which ones are potentially sticking points?"

"Of course."

Vanda Nossëo feels strongly about schools and health care access - "most people go 'sure, that'd be great if we could afford it, and we're happy to pay for it, so that's rarely a point of contention' - " and prison conditions. People can swap, and prisons that people prefer to swap out of get extra scrutiny and often an overhaul; it has to be straightforward for family to visit - 'reduces recidivism' and the standards for a suitable environment for children born in custody is such-and-such...

"...we normally sterilize criminals if it's more serious than shoplifting a candy bar. For eugenic reasons."

" - if you're really attached to eugenics as a concept there's a technology that, like, corrects genetic drift in embryos, it has a much stronger effect on the next generation than sterilizing criminals."

"There's also some resistance to criminals being allowed children when people who are not criminals desperately want them."

"Are you imagining you'd keep doing population controls even with a colony world?"

"One colony world for the entire planet won't be enough for long, even if it has greater land area."

"Could do one per country, seems like it might be easier than arranging for a collective of Amentan nations to become one member."

"A planet for Tapa will do for longer but still not indefinitely. We can certainly issue more credits. But implementing population controls from a position of having none is - well, it was a rough time in the planet's history and we wouldn't be eager to have to do it again."

Nod. "You have history and experience here and we don't, I think we're willing to defer to Amentans on that."

      "It does seem," says one of the other Elves, "that your current system is selecting very hard for the Amentans who want children the most desperately."

"Only if they also have the ability to achieve something to get them," says the Tapai liaison. "Merely having bad springs won't earn a credit. We subsidize a charity that lets people use gametes from anyone who has voluntarily not had children by the time they are twenty, although we're not sure we wouldn't do more harm than good with a campaign to encourage its use."

"Do you think Tapa'd be open to two-per-family and an auction on top, with embryonic gene cleaning so you're still doing better on the eugenics front than previously with less, uh, pressure?"

"There's a lot of bad feeling about Voa right now..."

"You could disguise it? An auction but the first two subsidized by the aliens, and the subsidies sufficient to make it effectively free?"

"Disguised would work much better - I think there would be a lot of friction about allowing anyone with criminal history directly relevant to their ability to rear children to purchase credits and the disguised system allows tidier exclusion mechanisms than the Voan system."

Nod. "- the current enforcement mechanism is going to be a sticking point."

"If you'd landed thirty years ago no one would have dreamed of insisting on it. It was very unpopular when introduced. But it's been extremely successful at limiting noncompliance with the law."

"There's a neighbor of yours that executes peoples' families for crimes, they observe that it improves deterrence over just executing the responsible party. It probably does, deterrence just isn't the only important feature of a law enforcement policy."

"We do have a statute of limitations. I'm - not sure whether you expect gene cleaning to be somehow deployed in a way that would allow people reproducing without a credit to use it and to have results such that their children wouldn't inherit the criminality - you mentioned bad springs, too, this is definitely a bad-spring behavior."

Nod. "Once you have transit with the rest of the universe you will be flooded in people trying to rescue the babies. Or people will resurrect them, which negates the deterrent entirely."

"Isn't resurrection expensive?"

"Outrageously so. Babies killed for population control reasons is the kind of thing that gets a whole planet crowdfunding, though."

"Couldn't they just resurrect babies who die of complications with their births or something -?"