Social crimes are “crimes” to the extent that they fail to produce, contribute to, or otherwise advance society. The classic examples are suicide, abortion, contraception, homosexuality, prostitution, drug use and gambling.
These activities are personal in nature and not beneficial to the group. They aren’t necessarily counter productive like suicide. They just don’t promote or advance society, as in the case of gambling and drug use.
Prohibitions against abortion, contraception, homosexuality and prostitution are because they don’t produce children.
It’s interesting to note that these procreation related social crimes have deep religious roots. That’s because religions grew out of the prevailing social attitudes of the time.
Thousands / hundreds of years ago when civilizations were in their infancy, they needed every warm body they could get to survive. And the most successful ones recognized this and discouraged the “non productive” social activities through their religions.
The ones who didn’t have likely fallen to the pages of history. But human population is now way beyond its critical minimum and no longer needs these antiquated social prohibitions to survive. In fact quite the opposite is the problem now… Over population.
We can’t keep up our current levels of population growth and survive. We need to slow the population growth down to a long term sustainable level. Maybe even reverse it a little. And one of the ways to do this is to embrace these former social crimes and start encouraging them.
Make voluntary population control the social norm and excessive procreation a social crime.