That Child-Shaped Hole in the Universe

Assuming we are to have a national health service, which is to say assuming the taxpayer is to bestow medical aid upon the financially negligible, there must obviously be limits as to what treatments can be obtained. Alcoholism, as we know because the tabloid moralists have told us, is a lifestyle choice; as are obesity, transsexualism and such wages of idleness as depression, malnutrition and rickets. There has been, at various times, some controversy over whether these complaints and their consequences are worthy of treatment on the NHS. In the case of breeders, of course, there is no such argument. The production of yet more worker-consumers is always and forever an inherently meritorious enterprise; because if there's one thing the Anthropogene Extinction Event can do with, it's more human beings.