The Moral Case Against Parenthood Rings Hollow
Raising children gives life meaning in a way that forever living solo does not.
Last week, or maybe two ago (I cannot recall precisely as my normal busy life has been interrupted by the death of my mother in law), an anti-natalist article provoked the angst that anti-natalism tends to do. David Benetar, a philosophy professor and author of the book Better to Never Have Been, published an article laying out the moral case against procreation.
Benetar’s position, in a nutshell, is that it is better not to be, than to be:
. . . even if life isn’t pure suffering, coming into existence can still be sufficiently harmful to render procreation wrong. Life is simply much worse than most people think, and there are powerful drives to affirm life even when life is terrible . . .
Considering matters carefully, it’s obvious that there must be more bad than good. This is because there are empirical asymmetries between the good and bad things. The worst pains, for instance, are worse than the best pleasures are good.
Since I am a mother of four, readers might surmise that I disagree. And as one who has watched the decline and final breath of two parents in four months and has in the past few days sat through the blessings, memories, and dedications of a mother of three and grandmother of nine, I can tell you that I disagree with a case against procreation now more than ever.
I could go though many reasons. Most have been written. Luma Simms recently published an excellent article on what immigrant families know about intergenerational care, for one instance.
But it was my colleague, EdgeOfTheSandbox, who hit on the thing that I have seen turn the children or no children debate.
The desire to have children is, at root, about meaning and consequence. The childless often boast how they can jet off to some new adventure or otherwise order their lives as they please. That sounds like a blast. In ones 20s, or better yet 30s, when funds are probably more plentiful, it is. Eventually, however, we all must reckon with our lives. If we’ve pursued our own pleasure only, our life feels hollow. It may well be lonely. Relentless self-fulfillment is not the friend-maker the self help books made it seem with their “when you are happy, people are drawn to you” pitches.
One of the self-righteous childless once threw down the gauntlet in my Facebook feed, challenging those of us with children to provide a justification for parenthood. One of my friends, another mom of four, responded, “Parenthood connects us to the infinite and eternal.” Becoming a parent forces us connect to something bigger than ourselves, to a life that we can look back upon and know that it meant something that we lived. True, having children isn’t the only route to meaning and consequence — and some of us could benefit from recalling that from time to time — but having children is the most common route. That makes it the most predictable.
Those who either have no regrets about their childlessness, or have made peace with their regret, create meaning and consequence in some other aspect of their lives. The others grow bitter on the regret they will not admit. They can’t possibly be wrong, ergo, parents must be.
These are older links but still informative. Compare the stories of Elizabeth Wurtzel and Liz Jones to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice And UK Prime Minister Theresa May. (At the time of the interview she was Home Secretary so the links were a little more parallell.)
Rice and May thrive. Wurtzel and Jones despair. It might help to ponder why.
