Why do the governments intervene sexual and reproductive behaviours?

....(con't) Beyond Choice by Alexander Sanger

The governments throughout history have enacted laws and policies attempting to promote marriage, to restrict sexual activity to marriage for purposes of procreation, and in general to promote public morality. In addition to laws against contraception and abortion, there have been laws prohibiting adultery, fornication, rape, non-procreative sex, homosexuality and incest.

Why should governments intervene in some sexual and reproductive behaviors and decisions and not others?

Many societies now and in the past have believed that a large and growing population was necessary to attain their national objectives, in military, political, economic and social aspects. Today some societies believe that, on the contrary, a large and growing population will prevent them from attaining whatever their national goals might be. Citizens don’t necessarily cooperate with their nation’s demographic plans.

Though reproductive choices and decisions are personal, too often nations fear, sometime quite correctly, that individual sexual and reproductive behaviors in the aggregate can threaten the biological, social, economic, and political order. For these reason governments often do not leave sexual and reproductive matter entirely to the discretion of their individual citizens.

There is not always a clear line of cause and effect between a particular sexual practice or reproductive decision on the one hand and its ramification to the public on the other. Nonetheless, governments often intervene extensively into the sexual and reproductive lives of their citizens with only a hazy understanding of the actual biological or social consequences of their laws.

The governments do have legitimate interest in the sexual and reproductive lives of their citizens because governments were established in part to help their people survive and reproductive safely and successfully. While some nations encourage childbearing, others view excessive population growth as a threat to national economic growth and stability.

Most extreme cases are such as China’s “one child national policy” and in Romania, banning both contraception and abortion in 1980s.

In China, family planning and national policy effectively reduced population growth, however, was not without unintended consequences, such as female infanticides, in-balance sex ratio, health hazards exposed to couples and problems in elderly care and related social welfare.

In Romania, banning contraception and abortion did in the short run effectively increased childbearing but left with more women suffered from illegal abortion and demands with childcare.

The coercion measures in controlling population often have brought damaging consequences at the expense of women and children.