skygiants

With the disclaimer that it's been coming up on two decades and I was a kid who had not read The Color of Distance:

Either at the end of the first book or early in the second one, Juna has a brief relationship with a human dude and gets pregnant. This is an enormous problem because her Earth is massively overpopulated and has draconian laws surrounding reproduction—everyone is allotted three "child credits", but you need to spend four to actually legally have a kid. So a couple can have one kid, and then either buy more credits to have more kids, or sell their spare credits to provide for their only child.

This situation relies on birth control implants for women; unfortunately the Tendu elder who saved Juna turned hers off, because it looked like an injury, right? But Juna didn't actually know that until she got pregnant and had to explain that no, really, it's an accident and not an intentional breach of law. There's a trial and everything. (Juna's babydaddy wants her to get an abortion so he can keep his credits; she says that she'll buy credits and the judge tells him that since he's not married and his child credits aren't at stake he's no longer involved in this matter.)

... I think this was meant to contrast with the Tendu attitudes towards reproduction, family, and population control. I can't remember how well that worked but given the multiple warnings away I suspect not very well. (I remember also wondering if it was trying to say something about abortion rights but if so I couldn't figure out what, at least at age 12.)

For reasons that I don't remember, the judge decrees that Juna is not guilty of a crime and can carry her pregnancy to term, but she must get married!

So the book spends an inordinately long time on various families courting Juna (and her frog-alien adopted relations because they're a unit now). In the end, she turns down the rich family offering a jungle and joins her brother's group marriage. (Nothing incestuous is going on iirc; everyone involved treats it as a platonic coparenting agreement.)

Possibly the apparently intended third book was going to be about Moki and Juna's human kid?

(This may not have been the main plot, but it's the part that stuck in my brain, apparently. Complete with the math of how the child credit system worked.)