Article from Treehugger

I know, I know, more links on large families. I get a lot of those now because I have large families as a google alert. Plus it's just obviously a topic I'm interested in. I've encountered so much hate and negativity towards having more than 2 children on the internet, it was shocking to me for a while. Here's a comment someone left for the above linked article that I liked. It expresses the idea well:

It's so absurd to go around demonizing people who have more than two kids. In developed countries, population is dropping or will be very soon (drastically in the case of Japan). There is an extreme disincentive to have 'too many' children in developed countries (despite the hateful stereotypes some people here are spewing about welfare) because they are extremely expensive and inconvenient. In the places where population is increasing, its simply a matter of getting education, equality and contraception to women and affluence to the society. Having 5 kids is absolutely not what most women would do if the incentive of extra labor was taken away (better technology) and if there were opportunities to have a job and to prevent pregnancy.
Attacking the increasingly small numbers of Western families who decide to have more than two children makes the environmental movement look like fascists and turns the people who have a proportionally greater impact on the future (parents of large families) away from environmental causes. It also makes the environmental movement look ineffective, by focusing on pissing off their friends and neighbors instead of on sustainable development and raising female education and living standards in developing countries, which would prevent far more children from being born.