What are the ethics and underlying philosophical principles behind the issue of population control?

Although still highly topical issue today, the concept of population control is - perhaps unsurprisingly - an ancient one. Rulers, governments and individuals throughout history have tried to reason out the optimal size of their countries and communities since Antiquity. Plato and Aristotle, considering the populations of the Greek city-states, pondered the relative merits of abortion and infanticide around 350 BC, and 2,500 years before China’s much-discussed One Child policy Confucius completely foreshadowed the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus with grave predictions that unchecked growth causes strife, lowers the standard of living and increases mortality. Equally pro-natalist attitudes existed in the ancient world: the Emperor Augustus desired a high birth rate to maintain his legions and introduced the Lex Julia and the Lex Papia Poppaea around the birth of Christ, which highly incentivised childbirth (and levied ruinous death duties on a childless spouse) - a policy not entirely dissimilar to that currently in place in France. This essay seeks a loftier goal than to be a mere list of historical comparisons, however: it hopes to examine the ethics and the underlying philosophical theories behind population control, both the principle of the thing and the methods commonly employed.But why is population control a relevant topic now? Surely, we have moved beyond antediluvian Malthusian predictions of famine and ruin should we continue to see the population rise? Perhaps, but the current size of the population is the highest it has ever been, and it continues to grow (although the actual growth rate has declined since a predicted high in the 1960s). Great Britain (including what is now the Republic of Ireland) had a population of around 19 million in 1817, which has tripled to 65 million in the UK and 5 million in the ROI in 2017. In an era in which we nationally face urban sprawl, a shortage of housing and strain on public services, and internationally greater pressures on the environment and ever-increasing pollution and deforestation, questions should be raised over whether this sort of growth is sustainable and desirable, and if a stabilisation or even reduction in the population might be preferable on a country-by-country basis and worldwide. The ethics behind population control, and the methods governments may employ to affect population control, remain therefore an important and deeply topical issue.