The Population Program and some of its consequences

I would like to thank my imagination for making it possible for me to come up with this wonderful world, and my pessimism for helping me make it awful.

The Population Program was brought in 17 years after the defeat of the robot rebellion to increase the size of the human population. The reasons behind this were numerous and complicated but simplified: a fortress is hard to defend if there are few defenders and you can't get big armies without having a big population to recruit from first.

So, what were the CHG's methods of increasing the population?

Simple things out the way first:

Families with lots of kids got tax breaks.

Pro-"have tonnes of kids" propaganda was both subtly and not-so-subtly put out.

Abortions: the amount of time within a pregnancy before it became illegal to abort was reduced time and time again until it was down to 4 weeks. Also the doctors carrying these out were given "better equipment" that didn't work most of the time.

School curriculum no longer included teaching kids how to stay safe from the potential consequences of the diggy, although some (most were the "would tell a kid to be quiet when they're crying because they're trying to concentrate on the game they're trying to play under the desk when said kid is being beaten to a pulp by another of their students" type so yeah this was rare) teachers simply rammed it in alongside teaching kids about puberty and "how the diggy works".

Contraception was something the CHG had a monopoly on, so they just produced far less contraceptives so they were hard to acquire and then lower the quality of said contraception to the point where some actually increased the likelihood of a pregnancy.

Inter-Planetary Child Protection Services were made and they could drop off any orphaned or otherwise made so that their parents ain't taking care of them (quick example list: both parents = dead, seriously mentally ill, in prison, disappeared, physically injured to the point where they can't take care of the kid etc) kids into the hands of any relative of the kid they wanted within 8 levels of separation (out to 3rd cousin). This was a surprise tool that would help them in the next point.

Now things get real dodgy: make clone kids -> put kids in simulated world with sapient AIs that don't know they're in simulations either as the parents etc to the clones -> make "disaster" happen that kills the AIs in the simulation and which results in all the kids getting knocked the hell out -> take kiddos outta simulation while they still sleeping and insert them into "hospital" to treat any injuries because if you break their arm in simulation you gotta grab a baton and slam them on the same spot so they don't know and they gotta wake up somewhere reasonable -> play along to whatever happened in the simulation -> ship them to foster home or orphanage -> either then ship them to "relatives who had no idea they existed" (that said these people they get sent to know nothing about this and really are under the belief that these are nephews etc tat they just never knew about) or keep them in the orphanage/foster home. But how on Earth could they keep this up? Fun facts: usually hundreds of thousands of kiddos would be in the same simulation and would get confirmation bias off of them when they're all pulled out from the accident and natural disasters filled so much of the news that nobody would question the idea of some distant relative being killed in such a disaster and them having to take care of said kid now.

Let's give the "dude wtf" and upgrade and introduce our good friends the nanobots. You see, the cloned children were all injected with nanobots to make them more fertile (increased white tadpole production, longer period of time in the lady-cycle in which being impregnated was likely, increased egg production) and more likely to have twins or triplets. This was done through a mixture of these nanobots excreting hormones and them directly interfering in events (imagine the tadpoles having jetacks and sliding into the baby-oven to split that cell bundle up for some identical twins). On top of that, these nanobots were in high-level stealth mode because they were disguised as red blood cells and would automatically break down into plasma components if separated from the body of the person they were originally injected into. Their closest attempt at making up for this was returning women with the nanobots to a state that made them seem like they'd never given birth before. As a result of this, a pair of clones with these nanobots could be expected to have over a dozen children. These nanobots were also always placed into the children of clones alongside vaccinations with the pretense of their fertility being genetic, as well as into random children across the CHG, with a strong preference by the CHG for placing these into children on under-populated planets. Meanwhile a less extreme version of the nanobots that increased fertility but only slightly was injected into all children in the CHG within vaccines.

Consequences: people were pretty annoyed about the stuff they did know of such as how badly the CHG was trying to pretend that it wasn't just doing a swirly version of banning contraception and the usual abortion arguments came to dominate social media as people argued about the subject of abortion. The lowering of the age of consent was very controversial, especially since it paired with a lack of contraception and realistic ability to get abortions (somehow having to know within 4 weeks + being a teenager who doesn't want to be seen going into an abortion clinic + needing to make a choice within those first 4 weeks) to result in a lot of teenage pregnancies.

Furthermore, it messed up the financial stability of a lot of people. Boys and girls who were previously on their way to easy street because of how well they were doing in school found themselves becoming parents far too young, especially with multiple children in cases where the girl had been injected with multiple nanobots.

At the same time, the cloned and orphaned were often placed into the hands of "relatives" who couldn't or wouldn't take good care of them due to the corruption within the Inter-Planetary Child Protection Services, parts of which basically became child/slave traffickers as they forged documents claiming that the kids were actually GMOs that just looked like them, that they were dead or missing, and then sold these "GMOs" on the black market to private companies, which were then able to forge documents to claim that their slaves were acquired legitimately.

Next, the planets weren't filled as much as the CHG would've liked as, even when places were crowded, many still stayed on their planets of origin due to steep travel prices and simple preference - with many planets still not having anyone moving into them. The CHG introduced what is best considered the same as the UK's Green Belt Laws by making it illegal to build on large sections of planets, with the CHG suddenly acquiring a desire to protect nature that it hadn't had for a long time previously, in order to force people to go elsewhere, and also made a state-run transportation service that was cheap enough for everyone to afford.

A lot more people grew into having more mental and psychological issues because of a few things: economic strain meant that parents had to spend much more of their time working and so couldn't pay as much attention to their kids, children that were allocated to new homes by the IPCPS (which included most of the cloned kids. Y'know, the ones that are gonna end up with the most kids and so are exactly the ones you DON'T want to end up with serious mental or psychological disorders) were often transferred into abusive, neglectful, financially unable or otherwise "bro don't put the kid there" households, the kids in orphanages and foster homes (fun fact: the same facilities are used as both in CHG world) were generally poorly taken care of (and the majority of these were the clones so again with that earlier brackets point) with the places they were in being more like prisons than somewhere you actually want kids growing up, etc.

As for that economic strain: the CHG was previously in the market for many essential or important-to-daily-life products like water, basic foods (and I'm talking ration bars here not those ), cheap clothes, electricity, etc. They deliberately set low prices, often at a loss for some products that was covered by profit from other areas, so that even poor families would be able to afford the basic essentials to get by. Well, the CHG decided to stop doing that to a degree as the focus shifted from trying to make sure people could get by to making a profit for the CHG, resulting in much higher profits and the privatization of much of the CHG's market stuff, leaving many unable to afford basic goods like clothing and food, especially because they had so many expensive children.

In a shorter version, this led to civil war within humanity to get Game of Thrones fans googling their eyes in confusion because of how it and other CHG policies combined to make life very tough for people and the fact that the GTO would release the knowledge of these secret parts to the program so that more would want to rebel against the CHG.