"Well, we've got them all enlisted in the military - maybe there's a civilian equivalent? A humanitarian relief corps or something, just something that gets everyone during young adulthood working alongside people from different cultural backgrounds and in a clear and well-defined command structure where their officers can get to know them - most human crime is concentrated in men aged sixteen to thirty, you can very nearly vanish it just by keeping them occupied during that time period. Wouldn't even have to be mandatory, just very generously compensated.

Then if, say, someone is beating his wife, she can go to her commanding officer and they can investigate, sit him down and figure out what's going on and warn him he's endangering his status, if necessary transfer him across the continent -"

"If necessary?"

"Something like twenty percent of human relationships involve a domestic violence incident, if I immediately dragged off all the perpetrators not only would I be imprisoning a significant fraction of humans but also their partners wouldn't report it!!"

"- ooh, and you're also making it unlikely for people in that age group to have kids in the picture, I bet that helps."

"Yeah, younger parents are significantly likelier to be abusive or just plain incompetent and significantly likelier to split up and significantly harder to discipline because we really, really don't want to take custody away, so we just aim for very few births to people under twenty-four - twenty-six for men - and then we can get all the at-risk families special attention."

"What form does the special attention take?"

"Counseling, mostly - sometimes help hiring another person to take some strain off the parents - humans need more sleep than they can get when they have children, it's really dreadful -"

"It is. Sort of an evolutionary miracle, at least in places where we appear by evolution and not 'Eru having a giggle'."

"Mine are Eru having a giggle. Anyway, once they're out of the service they get a pension, with increases for each child which they qualify for at first by seeing a healer during pregnancy, and then by getting the children an education - practically everything we do actually goes through the pensions, if they break laws the first resort is fines garnished from the pension and if they're financially irresponsible the first resort is breaking the pension into smaller more frequent chunks - if you have competent Valar then maybe you can just get the plants edible and you don't have to figure out what to do if someone spent all their money on alcohol and is now starving -"

"Am I correct in thinking that if humans could not have children by accident they would promptly go extinct."

"Sounds about right. There's a thing called demographic transition where once reliable birth control is freely available reproduction rates drop to or below replacement. Revelation got over a tech hump so parenting is now cheap and comparatively easy and enough people pick it up, but - yeah."

"Our birth rates are six to nine, varies regionally, were ten to fourteen before we started aggressively discouraging young parents, infant mortality is fourteen percent."

"That's half Muggle Britain's."

He puts his head in his hands and whimpers.

"Do, do most people lose a child or is it concentrated more -"

"Most people lose a child - there'll be a disease outbreak that kills half the children under two, or they're born dead or born early and die right away - if you count lost pregnancies than the mortality rate is near fifty, humans lose pregnancies all the time..."

"Most lost pregnancies are very early, early enough that it's entirely possible not to have noticed it," Cam mentions.

"We don't know if humans have souls or when they get them, but Elves- uh, soul Elves - get them at conception-"

"I am not aware of any evidence for humans having souls except maybe wizards. People don't show up in Limbo from Revelation unless they die after being born, if you want to use that as a benchmark."

"Eru humans seem likelier than humans from other worlds to have souls but I don't know how we'd check. Maybe Mandos might know."

"We don't develop our chips until a ways into gestation and they are serving the function of souls for us but I can't say I ever found that very morally relevant."

"If they have souls then there's something that keeps existing and perhaps keeps developing when they die, even if they die unborn. It would be pretty relevant."

"What's the story on - wizard souls -?"

"There are a couple forms of magic which are said to work on the soul, all of them are obscure and hard to test for one reason or another and given the information available to me there could be non-soul explanations. Wizards who die violently can leave a ghost, supposedly you can cheat death by tearing up your soul in dark rituals and then hiding the pieces, the Dementor's Kiss supposedly had its effect by sucking out your soul, things like that..."

"Can Dementors not - 'kiss', what a euphemism - Muggles?"