The Licence Nobody Asks For

Paperwork for everything

Sixty-six years on this planet and I’ve lost count of the forms. To drive a car, you sit a test. To fish a Spanish river, you buy a permit. To adopt a rescue dog, a stranger visits your home, inspects your fences and asks pointed questions about how long you leave the house each day.

To adopt a child, you’ll be assessed for months, sometimes years, by people professionally trained to find the cracks in you.

To make a child? Nothing. No test, no visit, no form until the birth certificate. And that holds even for someone who has already had children removed by a court because they were beaten, starved or simply left. In the eyes of the law, the fourth pregnancy looks exactly like the first.

So here’s the question I can’t put down. If a child has a right to be born into something resembling safety, why does that right only switch on after the damage is done? And the honest follow-up, the one most people skip because it’s uncomfortable: if we did step in earlier, what would that actually look like… and who would end up holding the clipboard?

Spoiler. The world has already tried several answers. Some were humane. Some rank among the ugliest things modern states have done to their own citizens. The trick is learning to tell them apart.

The idea isn’t new, and its father blinked

In 1980 an American philosopher called Hugh LaFollette published a paper with the gloriously blunt title “Licensing Parents”. His argument was disarmingly simple. We license activities that are potentially harmful, that need competence, and where we can reasonably test for that competence. Doctors. Pilots. Drivers. Parenting, he argued, ticks every box, so all parents should be licensed.

He also lobbed the grenade I opened with. We already vet adoptive parents ferociously, so why do biological parents get a free pass? His suspicion was that, deep down, many people still believe parents somehow own their children.

It’s a neat argument. It’s also spent forty-odd years being taken apart by other philosophers, and the objections are worth knowing because they’re the ones your Uncle Derek will raise at Christmas. Croatian philosopher Bruno Pušić put the practical ones crisply: a licensing scheme would subject far too many people to unnecessary tests, and parenting simply isn’t comparable to the professions we normally license. You’d be marching millions of perfectly decent parents through an exam to catch a small number of dangerous ones, using a test nobody knows how to write.

Here’s the telling bit. When LaFollette revisited his idea in 2010, he’d softened. The revised version rewards parents who undergo training and pass basic competency tests with a tax break. His critics Jurgen De Wispelaere and Daniel Weinstock argued that he could only escape the original problems by watering the proposal down until the licence became effectively obsolete.

And they’re right. A licence you can’t be refused isn’t a licence. It’s a loyalty card.

Some states already tried it. You know how this goes.

Before anyone gets carried away with a shiny new licensing regime, it’s worth remembering that we don’t have to imagine one. Several countries built them, and the receipts are public.

China is the obvious example. For decades, couples needed government permission before giving birth. Even after the formal approval step for a first child was dropped, the US State Department noted that pregnancy registration could still work as a de facto permit, with some local governments mandating abortion for single women who fell pregnant. When the two-child policy arrived, couples with two or fewer children no longer needed birth permits and simply registered instead. Then the population started shrinking, and in 2023 Sichuan dropped its restrictions on unmarried people having children.

Notice what happened there. China’s birth permit was never about whether a child would be safe. It was about numbers. The moment the numbers flipped, so did the rules. A licence serves whoever writes the criteria, and criteria have a habit of changing with the political weather.

Sweden, that cuddly beacon of Nordic decency, ran a sterilisation programme from 1934 to 1976. A 2000 government report estimated 21,000 people were forcibly sterilised, with another 6,000 coerced into so-called voluntary sterilisation. The Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly later put the total number of victims of Sweden’s eugenic sterilisation laws at over 60,000. Much of it was dressed in the language of social welfare, which is precisely the language a parental competency test would use.

Japan’s Eugenic Protection Law ran from 1948 to 1996 and allowed authorities to forcibly sterilise people with disabilities and order abortions where either parent had certain conditions. The government acknowledged 16,500 operations performed without consent. In July 2024, Japan’s Supreme Court finally ruled the law unconstitutional and ordered compensation, finding it ran against respect for individual dignity.

The United States and the UK aren’t innocent bystanders in this history either. American states began legalising forced sterilisation from 1907, and Britain flirted heavily with the same eugenic ideas in the early twentieth century.

Here’s the uncomfortable common thread. Every one of these regimes believed it was protecting children and society from unfit parents. The words “fitness” and “competence” weren’t invented by the reformers of today. They were the operating manual of the people we now pay compensation to clean up after.

The quiet middle: what countries actually do now

So nobody sensible wants to resurrect the permit or the scalpel. But here’s what almost nobody notices. Most wealthy countries have already built something between “anyone can do anything” and “apply in triplicate”. They just don’t call it licensing, and they certainly don’t advertise it.

The United States has “Birth Match”. In Maryland, the law requires social services to carry out a safety assessment whenever a child is born to a parent who previously lost rights to another child. Missouri’s version compares birth reports against parents convicted of certain crimes or whose parental rights were terminated. Maine requires its department to check new birth records for prior terminations within 24 hours. Nobody is stopped from having a baby. But the state is quietly waiting in the maternity ward with a file.

The UK has no such database match, yet arrives at a similar place by a messier road. Research led by Professor Karen Broadhurst at Lancaster University found that roughly one in four mothers in a first set of care proceedings are at risk of returning to court within ten years, and that 82.2% of children in first repeat cases involving a new child are babies. In Wales, only 19% of care proceedings for a first child involved babies under a month old, compared with 61% for subsequent children. In plain English: once you’re known to the system, your next baby is far more likely to be taken at birth.

The UK has also produced one of the more hopeful answers. Pause, a programme working with women who’ve had children removed, has been linked to an average reduction of 14.4 infants entering care per year per local authority in areas where it runs. It also estimates £4.50 saved for every £1 spent over four years. The catch? Broadhurst describes the funding for this pioneering work as short-term and skeletal.

The Netherlands went for conversation rather than control. Its programme Nu Niet Zwanger (“Not Pregnant Now”) has care workers talk openly with vulnerable clients about whether they want children, and support them with contraception if they choose it. It’s aimed largely at people dealing with addiction, serious psychiatric problems or intellectual disability. By 2025, 89% of Dutch municipalities had signed up. It’s voluntary, it’s opt-in, and it’s still controversial, because “we’d like to have a chat about your fertility” lands very differently depending on who’s asking whom.

Lay them side by side and you get a spectrum rather than a switch:

Approach	Example	Who it reaches	Can you say no?
Birth permit	China (historic)	Everyone	No
Forced sterilisation	Sweden, Japan (historic)	People judged “unfit”	No
Database alert at birth	USA (Birth Match states)	Parents with prior terminations	No, the check happens anyway
Removal at birth via courts	UK	Parents already known to services	Only by contesting in court
Support after removal	UK (Pause)	Women who’ve lost children	Yes
Fertility conversation and contraception	Netherlands (Nu Niet Zwanger)	Vulnerable adults	Yes

The real debate isn’t licence versus freedom. It’s where on that table a decent society should sit.

The person nobody asks

In every one of these debates, the adults get lawyers, advocates, campaign groups and op-eds. The newborn gets a cot and a case number.

That imbalance is the heart of the work of James Dwyer, a law professor at William & Mary in Virginia, who has spent years making an argument that sounds radical until you sit with it. He contends that newborns, far more clearly than birth parents, have fundamental interests at stake when the state decides who their legal parents will be, and so have a stronger claim to protection. Where a parent has already shown gross misconduct in raising children, he argues the state should be willing to end parental rights at birth, or in some cases before it.

He also punctures a bit of comfortable social work vocabulary. A newborn, he points out, has no established relationship with the birth parent to maintain, so calling efforts to rehabilitate an unfit parent “reunification” is a misnomer. And he cites a programme where intensive services shifted the share of cases social workers judged safe for a child’s return only from 11.6% to 15.5%.

Here’s where I think Dwyer does something clever, and it’s the bit that rescues the original “licence” instinct from its own worst version. He isn’t proposing to license conception. Nobody’s body gets touched. What he questions is the automatic assumption that the state should hand legal custody of a newborn to whoever produced it, regardless of what they’ve already done to their other children.

That distinction matters enormously. The right to reproduce is, at its core, a right to keep the state’s hands off your body. It is not obviously a right to have the state deliver a baby into your care, no questions asked, with your track record sitting unread in a filing cabinet across town.

International law points the same way, at least on paper. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child makes the child’s best interests a primary consideration in every action concerning them. Nearly every country on Earth has ratified it. The United States, rather awkwardly for a nation that loves talking about freedom, is the notable holdout.

So who fails the test?

This is the part of the argument where I have to argue with myself, because the case against is not made of soft-headed sentiment. It’s made of evidence, and some of it is damning.

First, poverty wears a disguise. “Neglect” in a case file very often means no money, no housing, no help. Broadhurst’s own conclusion was that national policy needs to tackle the persistent poverty and insecurity that wear away the things protecting families. A competency test administered to people with nothing will mostly measure how little they have.

Second, look at who’s actually in the dock. Over 40% of UK mothers returning to court were aged 14 to 19 when they first gave birth. Care leavers are heavily overrepresented. Read that twice. The state raised many of these young women, often badly, and then sat in judgement on them as mothers. A licensing regime wouldn’t break that cycle. It would formalise it, with a rubber stamp.

Third, prediction is a mug’s game. We are very good at spotting harm after it happens and quite poor at forecasting it in advance. Any system that acts on a prediction will catch some dangerous parents and some perfectly decent ones, and the decent ones will disproportionately be poor, young, disabled or from minority communities. That isn’t a guess. It’s the pattern every historical example above followed.

Fourth, databases grow. Regular readers know how I feel about systems sold as “just for the worst cases”. Look again at Missouri: its Birth Match doesn’t only flag prior terminations, it also covers certain criminal convictions. Dwyer himself suggests child protection agencies need “simply” install a program to cross-check databases it already holds. That word “simply” is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting. Every list ever built by a government has found new names to add.

And finally, the body. The moment enforcement reaches pregnancy or conception, you’re in the territory of forced contraception, forced abortion and forced sterilisation. Japan’s highest court told us in 2024 exactly how history judges that.

The counter to all of this is simple and brutal, and I don’t want to lose it. Every one of these objections is about protecting adults from the state. Meanwhile, the cost of doing nothing is paid by babies who never got a vote, a lawyer or a second chance.

Where I land

So, should we license parents? No. Not in the way the phrase suggests, with a test at the door and an official deciding who gets to try. The world has run that experiment, more than once, and the compensation payments are still going out.

But I don’t accept the comfortable alternative either, which is to pretend the state is a neutral bystander at birth. It isn’t. It already knows. It holds the court records, the case files, the previous removals. It just chooses not to remember them until another child is hurt.

What I’d argue for is narrower, and I think harder to dismiss:

No test for conception, ever. Nobody’s body, fertility or pregnancy becomes the state’s business by default.
Memory, not a licence. Where a court has already found severe abuse or neglect and permanently removed a child, a new birth triggers a fast, independent assessment. The question shifts from “has this baby been harmed yet?” to “what has changed since last time?”
Help that arrives before the judgement, not after. Properly funded, national programmes like Pause, rather than the short-term, postcode-lottery patchwork we have now.
Choice offered, never imposed. Voluntary support around contraception and family planning, Dutch-style, for people who want it. Offered with respect, refusable without penalty.
A hard ceiling on the database. Prior court findings of serious harm only. Not convictions for unrelated offences, not a social worker’s hunch, not whatever a future government decides is “unfit”.

That isn’t licensing. It’s the state finally doing what any half-decent adult does when they’ve seen something terrible happen to a child: remembering it, and acting like it matters.

We ask a man to prove he can reverse round a corner before we let him loose with a Fiesta. Surely we can ask a system that has already watched a child come to harm to keep its eyes open when the next one arrives.

#MarkhamUnfiltered