2 B R 0 2 B

2 B R 0 2 B is a satirical science-fiction short story by Kurt Vonnegut, first published in 1962.

Set in a near-future America that has solved overcrowding through strict population control, the story imagines a world where every birth requires a matching death. A government office—reached by the ominously jaunty number “2BR02B”—manages bureaucratized euthanasia, turning life-and-death decisions into paperwork and queue lines.

Inside a hospital waiting room, ordinary people wrestle with utilitarian logic versus human dignity as a looming delivery triggers the need for “volunteers.” A muralist, a public-health official, and anxious relatives frame the debate, revealing how well-intended systems can erode compassion when efficiency becomes the highest good.

Bleakly funny and brisk, the tale doubles as a pun on Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” and a warning about technocratic fixes to moral problems. Vonnegut distills big questions into a compact fable with a chilling aftertaste.

"Everything was perfectly swell.
There were no prisons, no slums, no insane asylums, no cripples, no poverty, no wars.
All diseases were conquered. So was old age.
Death, barring accidents, was an adventure for volunteers.
The population of the United States was stabilized at forty-million souls."