Am I the only person who is totally icked out by the idea of sex and Kes?? Why do people think she is sexy? She's like a sweeter than thou kitten. Not. Sexy.
Come to think of it... If an Ocampa can only have one baby, why doesn't the population of Ocampa cut in half every five years?
That's not counting how many babies are lost when they fall out of that back thing and hit the ground head first if no one is there to catch it.
I certainly could not have had sex with either of them! And Paris, well... he would have had sex with the bulkhead if it had eyelashes.
It's very possible it was. Living underground wasn't their natural habitat. Due to that, they had already lost their survival skills and mental powers. It could have been why there was a movement among Ocampian youth to want to leave.
Multiple births, twins or triplets, and a higher female to male ratio, which would suggest polygamy. Or This is the debt that can never be repaid. Or Genocide. Every generation is shrinking by half, because of something caretaker did, so that one day in the future he could fuck off after the Ocampa as a species had had a "good" run.
In our universe: Bad writing! The same as the silly nine-year lifespan. In the Trek Universe: Maybe they had twins, triplets or more. Note that in "Dreadnought" Kes states that she had an uncle named Elrem. How could she have an uncle if the Ocampa could have only one child? As for Neelix, I think that this relationship should have been possible after Kes dumped him:
How? Samantha Wildman had a husband. Niomi wasn't born out of thin air. That would have been a great homecoming: "Hey Dad, Mommy was cheating on you with a Hedgehog right in front of me, knowing you were faithful waiting for us to return all these years."
Love conquers aaaaaaaaaaalllllll! Seriously, it would have explained why Neelix was hanging around the Wildman family as much as he did without making him look like a shady figure. And I still think they would have been a lovely couple.
I could see that the men come with non-functional back sacks, or empty cavities where the sack should have been, like how men have nonfunctioning nipples... But why differentiate genders if you're not going to oblige to keep the gender understandable. It's not like Janeway would hook up with an perceptible gender in Workforce and never explan how she interlocks with that persons body with her own womanly bits..
Why shouldn't both genders gestate like both genders digest? There can still be other gender differences. The males don't have breasts so the feeding role will fall on the females.
And that's why new genders have to be established/defined. Andorians have 4 genders, and 8472 has 5. There are more than just male and female out there, and just because there are two genders in some species by majority, they don't have to be male and female.
The only argument against the 'Average litter of 3-4' theory is that Kes and her daughter only had one child each. Maybe that's because their mates were human though.