A Wild Idea

I'm sitting in the sun in the backyard, doing my summer reading and thinking about pedagogy, so obviously I'm doing some heavy "in a perfect world" daydreaming.

People can't just go get married willy-nilly without a license. (In fact, many churches won't marry you unless you've taken a pre-marriage course together, called a Pre-Cana)
They can't just go driving down the street or motorcycling without some training and a license.
In Massachusetts, they can't get some of the better mortgage deals without a first-time-homebuyer lecture course.
They can't fly a plane without serious training and a license.

So why are birth certificates required by the state governments, but only as an afterthought? It is just as reckless to bring another person into the world when you are unprepared as any of the items listed above. Marriage and divorce clearly aren't basic human rights allowed without some paperwork and certification, so why is getting pregnant? Pregnancy only leads to two possible outcomes: baby in need of certification, or dead fetus, whether intentional or accidental. The government clearly has their foot in the door on the subject, but in a really sloppy, broken-ankle sort of way.

I'm still somewhat horrified at the story of the woman who uses abortions as her preferred form of birth control, and also by the woman in the very recent New York Times article who got one of her twin fetuses aborted because she knew she couldn't afford to raise both. And to be clear, I don't think abortion should be illegal in the slightest, but I think it is overused/abused as an option.