A leading academic has questioned whether disadvantaged families should have fewer children to stem the rising numbers of young people being removed from their parents and placed in out-of-home care.

In a paper to be published in the Medical Journal of Australia on Monday, the dean of medicine at Bond University Peter Jones argued placing children in out-of-home care can do more harm than good in some cases.

Professor Jones accepted the suggestion of creating public policies to limit the size of families among disadvantaged communities was controversial but essential given the ballooning number of children in care which has risen from 14,000 to 43,399 in the past two decades.

"We need to ask politically charged questions, such as should we be developing policies that encourage disadvantaged families to have fewer children," he said.