What right do you have to reproduce?
 

Shocker title aside, what right do we have to reproduce? And by "right" I'm suggesting justification.

Let's examine the reasons why we think we deserve to have kids in a thread and see where it goes.

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Hi, I'm Plan9. I'm painfully Caucasian and comfortably in the middle socioeconomic bracket. I graduated at the top of my class at a Major University, sport a lukewarm IQ, and have zero debt. I drive a sensible (boring) automobile, floss daily, and wear a bicycle helmet (dork). I have roughly two years worth of survival savings in my bank accounts. I can run a half marathon with little warmup, eat a high fiber diet, don't use tobacco products, and my doctor says I'm in prime physical condition for my age.

But what right do I have to reproduce? Have I earned it? Am I good raw materials? You could say I have desirable traits (physical/mental), a good foundation ("upstanding citizen," good job prospects, and family/friends safety net), and adequate resources (da Benjamins), but are those the only requirements? Something tells me the world isn't exactly hurting for more middle class white people.


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Based on daytime TeeVee (Jerry, Maury, Dr. Phil), we all know that idiots reproduce like rabbits. You don't have to have desirable traits, a good foundation, or adequate resources to blow a load into your trailer park honey. You don't even have to have two braincells to rub together to fuck. There aren't any 1984-style Thought Police to stop you from reproducing, being a shitty parent, or setting your offspring up for failure.

See, I don't think I deserve to have kids. I think it would be irresponsible for me to reproduce given how many other people are reproducing for no reason other than "accidents," boredom (we're married, what next?) or to milk meager government benefits. I can't jump on that bandwagon.

What, if anything, should stop me from getting a vasectomy tomorrow and living the dream?

I just can't justify reproduction. Any thoughts, TFPers? What about you?

If you don't have children but are planning on it, what is your justification?

If you have children, how did you justify it? What's the logic?

Trying to apply logic to biology is a futile endeavor. Logically, it doesn't make much sense for anyone to have children on the individual level. Except we've evolved to want to reproduce. This isn't a function of higher intelligence, so trying to look at it through the lens of higher intelligence doesn't really make sense.

Did you not check the username next to the OP? Higher intelligence need not apply. I'm just thinking practically.

Why would you want to have kids when you could save the money/time/effort/sleepless nights and buy a Ferrari?

What right have we to attend universities, own cars and live comfortably when there are so many poor people? So few people can even get a safe meal, and how many of us throw perfectly edible food away at least some of the time.

What right have we to do anything?

We do the things that we want to do, for whatever reason. Without diving into the whole, what is 'meaning/purpose' and and where do we get meaning/purpose' conversation, we do what makes us happy. At least, we do the things we think will make us happy (note the difference).

Let me ask you a slightly different related question.

What right has anyone to stop you?

Well, that's the problem with the vast majority of society. Nobody stops anybody.

Me? I stop myself. I could say it's fiscally responsible, environmentally responsible, etc.

Greedy treehugger is just as logical and populating white jesus' army, isn't it?

All I can think of as far as a "right" to have children is, Thank God that doesn't stop people from conceiving. Shit parents or not, if people had to prove themselves as good parental material the world would most probably be vacant. My wife beater dad, and depressed mom probably should never have reproduced, but I am soooooooo grateful they did, even when life sucks, at least I get to live it.

It's not a right, it's a gift. One that, when you are ready to open it, can be THE most rewarding and devastating experience a human can know. If one has to justify having a child, then maybe they should not have one, there is no true justification for procreation except the perpetuation of a species and the base desire to proliferate, albeit outside of farm hands and donor siblings. It is the experiment of living, of life, of experiencing that which changes your reality. It is creation, a moment in which tangible effort spills forth from a body and, if your ready, captivates existence. It is the awakening to more than just living til you die, but living so that others may live beyond you.

I do believe forced sterilization "Compulsory sterilization" still exists for some criminals and mentally disabled individuals, therefore, it is not necessarily a right if you are proven to be grossly inadequate as a parent.

Where would a so-called "right" come from? From God? From the laws of Karma? As I understand the way humans use the word "right," it seems to mean something like political power that has been gained by force, negotiation, barter, economic exchange, or just plain bullying someone or some group into acknowledging a behavior as allowed or acceptable.

I don't really think about having such things as "rights."

I exist within a bunch of power relationships.

As for the question about having children...the less the better for us all, IMO.

I'd be in favor of any law that limits or reduces the number of humans born on the planet in any circumstance.

When it comes to people, less is definitely better.

I dunno, ideally it would be the desire to have a loving family that includes children.

When I contemplate whether I want my own children, I don't base my ultimate decision on what other people are doing—especially not those who are doing it "wrong."

9er, you make it sound like everyone's doing it wrong. Turn off the TeeVee.

Well, since you put it that way, let's start by assuming that you intend to raise your potential progeny to reflect your values. The next generation will have to be set into place to provide for the offspring of those that should never have been permitted to reproduce. Looking at the question from that facet, it quickly becomes clear that you not only have the "right", and the "justification", but you also have a responsibility to sire taxable producers to support the next generation of non-producers. So the question is not so much what right do you have to reproduce, but how long do we continue to allow those that cannot take care of the children that they already have, to continue to propagate. Not a goddamn thing. Look, from what I can tell, you're in the process of setting up the foundation to have a very successful life for yourself. In less time than you think, you'll be able to ditch the boring sensible automobile and get yourself a fast and shiny sports car. You will be able to have a home that will be the envy of all that you know. Your clothes won't be from J.C. Penney's. But...then what? For me, the kids are what makes it all worthwhile. So, no...you don't have a "right" to have children. But, if it's justification that you're looking for, the feeling that you get from looking in on your sleeping children makes the minivan in driveway, and the foot lacerations from stepping on stray Lego's all worth it. Otherwise, what are you really working for?

Meh. I plan to reproduce because I have awesome, awesome gifts to pass on, both genetic and otherwise. (Humility among them.)

Seriously, though, anyone's got a right to reproduce. Because it's a dice roll. Just because two people are awesome doesn't mean their offspring won't be stupid assholes. And just because two people are mouth-breathing, illiterate, possum-rapers doesn't mean their kids couldn't be brilliant, graceful, and loving. Genetics and enivironment both play their important parts in shaping us, but both are still in large measure subject to our own choices. That's just the way it goes, dude.

I don't think I should reproduce. I have too many medical problems (seizures, sleep apnea, and probably more intense fibromyalgia when I'm older) that I don't want to pass on. I also don't think I would make a good husband (father yes, husband no) which equals unhappy family usually.

Well, should people be stopped from reproducing? Is greedy tree-hugger more worthwhile in some way than birthing the next generation of religious fundamentalists and/or welfare cases?

You seem to think it is, but does the same logic follow through for everyone? Does it have to (apply to everyone)?

When you can answer, with universal certainty and applicability, the question of why one particular lifestyle is more 'worthy' than another, please let me know.

I saw this thread when it first went up (I think I may have even seen the first version, too), and I've been thinking about it all day.

Everyone and everything has the right to survive and reproduce. Usually that costs something else it's ability to survive and reproduce, but that's nature for you.

So there we go - everyone has the right to breed if they see fit. If they don't, so be it.

That part is pretty simple to me. You exist therefore you have the right to reproduce.

What's more complex is whether or not we have the right, as Art and the Chinese would have it, to tell people NOT to reproduce, especially if they've already done so once. Personally, I say "no" because that's about the cruelest thing I can think of.

The_Wife recently told me that she doesn't feel like our family is complete. I honestly disagree. I like only having 2 kids - even numbers, we're almost out of diapers, etc. But how can I tell the woman I love that she's wrong about this? Hint: I can't.

Honestly, I really and truly only care about one penis in this world - mine. That's the one I'm responsible for, and I don't give a rat's ass what other guys do with theirs. You stick it in whomever you want and wrap it or not. Me = big old cup of don't care. But if you were to try to convince me that I don't have a right to reproduce to my face, I'll probably take a swing at you, regardless of how much I know you're going to kick my ass.

Excellent. Self-imposed eugenics would be the point of this thread.

In class, so I'll keep it short, but:

In China, your 'right' to reproduce is delimited by the State's right to maintain a level of population consonant with a sustainable future. i.e., The State's interest in maintaining enough food/power/housing/water/aka a good living standard trumps your 'right' to reproduce (more than 1 baby)

Wiki How has an article on this, thank god for the good ol' interwebz ... >>Linky

The question is, what right do you have to pose the question? every right!

so what right do i have to have kids?

smart, dumb, fat, skinny, happy,unhappy etc etc, (and everything in between) people can justify procreating one way or another? why procreate?
the answer is it's 'because you can'.

People have different reasons to justify their actions (or inactions). some people build motobikes as projects, other people raise families, other do both. do you need to 'justify' it to anyone but yourself or your partner? not really

at the end of the day, people arent metallic objects from the future. They are living, breathing being with feelings, emotions and needs (or wants).

And thus they're not just a hobby like "motobikes." They're a huge responsibility to the individual and society. Requires a lot of thought, no?

Will you be my baby daddy?

I have no idea.

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The reason that I had children was sex.
The motivation was sex, and love.
The right was natural, inherent as a sexual being.

Yes, I believe there is more to being a fab parent than just the idyllic-for-some pic you paint. If you were to lose your health and support and income/savings, you would need to continue to provide for your children and their well-being in all aspects. This takes, at the very least, interest and interaction and some smarts.

However, the Standard of Care in many states is much less than this, and humans can survive just fine with those too.

Ontologically speaking, the concept of rights is meaningless. If a woman allows my penis to enter her vagina with the expectation of a possible impregnation, that is justification enough. Lesser animals (and some men) consider mere access to the vagina as sufficient cause, regardless of the means by which it is obtained, so I would consider myself one step higher on the moral ground.

Of course, I've no interest in the acquisition of offspring, so birth control methods are vital allies against that threat.

I'm surprised Schopenhauer hasn't been brought up yet.
I suppose it depends on how you look at it. I mean, the world is overpopulated as it is, but do we (as intelligent people) have the obligation to try and reproduce to the point where there are more intelligent people being born than dumbasses? No homo, but Plan9 certainly makes a strong argument for himself (although having never met him, I can't really offer any counterpoints because I don't know many of his negative traits), so does he have the obligation to try and produce as many babies as possible, in the hopes that he and others like him making more kids than the dumbasses on maury, springer, montel, etc?
As it is, we no longer live in a time of natural selection. Now we have welfare, police, firefighters, EMTs, medicare, etc, so it's harder to weed out the idiots, which surely is at least partly why we are so damn overpopulated.

Me personally, I wouldn't mind having a little girl someday, someone I could spoil rotten and nurture and take care of. Of course, I have asthma, bad eye sight, and bad hearing, not to mention my family history of bipolar disorder, numerous cases of suicide, alcoholism, drug addiction, heart disease. Granted, I listed only the negatives here, but i think my point remains valid.

We're not overpopulated; we're misusing resources. Well, enough of us are, anyway.

Sorry, I just....... did you really just say that?

YouTube - no homo.

Apologies for the threadjack.

Sex is nice. So far, kids have been a net positive in my life. I don't think that there's a whole lot of justification warranted beyond "I want to have kids."

From the other side, if you are an intelligent, competent, emotionally intelligent person you probably should reproduce, or at least adopt, because the world could use more of your type raising kids.

Talking about biology ... humans have already broken all boundaries of biology for several milleniums now, in order to breed much more than nature allows us to. In nature, there is are natural barriers to breeding profusely, and especially, the male participation in breeding (and bringing up offsprings) is very limited amongst mammals. While a huge population of males don't breed at all, most of those males who breed do it only a couple of times in their life, that too, towards the latter part of adulthood. Our societies, sought to beat this natural barrier by making the marriage institution and forcing all men to breed.

On top of that, today, the medical science has grown so advanced that mortality rate has gone down immensely, and all of this put together has resulted in a situation where human population has grown out of proportion to a point where mother earth can not bear any more humans on her surface. We've driven out several of the other species on the planet to a point of extinction, many are on the verge of extinction and for the rest we've made life pretty difficult.

The lives of humans themselves have become a great misery, and a large part of the human population is living below the poverty line.

Am I intelligent? If so, am I intelligent because of genetics? If so, how much have my genetics contributed to my intellect? If quite a bit, does that mean I will have intelligent offspring? Is intelligence a survival trait?

But yeah, the right to reproduce would seem to be something worth defending during times of underpopulation and something not worth defending during times of overpopulation. That said, it's generally considered to be unethical to force people not to reproduce or to have them rendered unable to reproduce. And clearly people aren't willing to volunteer to any meaningful degree to abstain from having children.

We'll hit the wall, crash, and then probably do it all over again. It'll be a gas.

Well, this can be argued... but let's say for the sake of this thread that they're essentially the same problem:

The planet / nature / the environment is waaay outta balance thanks to all the upright apes.

Well, my argument is that it has more to do with how we use/abuse resources than it does with our net population.

If we had a choice between building/re-engineering all our cities with zero-energy buildings populated with self-sustaining societies versus literally decimating the world population and going with the one-child policy, I would like to choose the former. (Okay, that's unfair....but generally I choose the former vs. investing all kinds of efforts into curbing current population trends.)

The solution to our problems have more to do with how we spend our resources and how we treat our biodome planet than it does with our population.

It's not that there are too many of us (not yet, anyway); it's that too many of us are wasteful selfish hogs.

Yeah, I think it would be more realistic to suggest a nuclear missile exchange between two major world powers every 100 years as a method of population control. Expecting up-and-coming nations (China, India, etc) to improve their world-shittingness is silly. They're making money.

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When I see my peers with their kids, I can't help but think that "one could have been enough" or that they didn't really need to have kids because they can't even take care of themselves. Sometimes it's a personal judgment, sometimes its just blatantly obvious. Me? I don't think I should have kids because I'm too selfish. I have no desire to carry the burden of a creature less able to take care of itself than a puppy for several years, along with all the money spent on it that could be used to further myself. I have options... I can pay cash for a PhD or I can father another screaming poo factory.

In America men have no rights to reproduction.
Women are in 100% control of the life force, they decide if the baby is going to be born.
Men have no rights to reproduction.

If having children was a purely financial decision, no one would do it. There are obviously huge reasons to have them, though.

Sure, it involves (fiscal) sacrifices, cleaning up poo/wee/vomit and other huge changes in the parent's lives, but it has heaps of (less tangible) upsides.

That is not altogether true. In America still, having children is a lucrative event if you are receiving government assistance, welfare money.
Not as much as it was 40 years ago, but still somewhat lucrative.

Just curious: do you know what the word lucrative means?

In all seriousness: you're grossly exaggerating.

As an aside: if money were no object, I'd probably have kids by now.

It's much more lucrative to have kids in most western European nations than it is to have children in the United States. Welfare isn't what it used to be--there's a reason it's called TEMPORARY Assistance to Needy Families now. By the way, social science research has largely disproved the image of the "welfare queen" in American society--the woman having more and more children to collect more and more welfare.

And by lucrative you mean "affording a lifestyle similar to that of the slack-jawed inbreds on Maury." TANF isn't a cushy ride.

Noooooo! Don't do it. How are we supposed go on our Easy Rider adventure if you've got daddy duties?

But what about the all-you-can-eat Kraft dinner?! :orly:

Well, given that you'd have to fund such an adventure, let's just say money will always be an object.

Poverty is great birth control device for the over-educated.

That reminds me of something that was brought up in a tiny shot-to-shit Afghan school in a village out near Gardez.

"Afghan girls that go to school don't have family until they're 16."

I guess that's progress. Primary education as a contraceptive in a third world country.

Yes.

And 9er, research discussed in a geography course I took last year suggested that when women are better educated, the birth rate drops. Several places in India have lowered their birth rates successfully merely by sending girls to school.

I hope for their sake that their debt load doesn't exceed their annual income.

The biggest personal reason I would never have kids is simply that I don't like them, and would probably mistreat them as such.

The point is, men don't really need any right in reproduction. Reproduction is out and out a woman's job. A man's job in reproduction, in the wild (at least for mammalian males) is to be a supplier of sperm.

But that should be completely alright. There is more to life than reproduction.

Personally, I don't know if I want kids, but I usually lean toward no for all the reasons mentioned above... cost, time, lack of sleep, lack of being seen as a person and instead just as 'mom' (okay, I added that last one).

Also as said above, everyone has the 'right' to reproduce, but I don't think everyone should... there are definitely ways in which forced sterility could benefit society. Someone up there basically said that perhaps upstanding citizens have the moral obligatin to reproduce so their offspring can support the next generation of degenerates... wouldn't the more logical sollution be to stop the degenerates from being born in the first place?

However, in this PCified western world, nothing like this would be allowed to happen... and in places where it does happen, like China, it's taken too far... which begs the questions of who would set the rules... who would determine which people were allowed to reproduce... etc.

Actually, the first post in this thread sounds to me more like someone trying to justify not having kids to themselves (most families, friends, etc... including mine... push people close to them to 'give me grandkids' or whatever). I definitely think no one who doesn't really want kids should have them... that's just not fair to the kids. I don't think not having kids needs any kind of justification.

Something about that statement doesn't ring true for me.
There is more to life than reproduction... hmmmm, like what for instance?
Without reproduction there is no more life, at all.
Life ends without reproduction.

As if to say, well, I was born, I have my life now, the future doesn't matter, the next generation is not of me, therefore it doesn't matter.

To me that sounds disrespectful to life itself, and what kind of life is there if nobody respects it?

In my view, the current situation, where men have no rights to reproduction is really quite gross and inhumane.
To make matters worse, I feel I'm the only person in the world who sees things this way.
I respect life, birth, virginity, marriage, womanhood, sex, and love.
But nobody else does, at least, I've never actually met anybody who does.

It seems sad to me that the world cannot honor family unity enough to care about the next generation of life on this planet.
In the middle east, the women have no rights over reproduction.
Men will impregnate 12 year old girls and force them to have babies.
In western culture it's the opposite, women go about aborting children like reversing unwanted boob-jobs.

Theoretically, I agree with that. Although I believe this came to be for good reason. Women have been branded as society's caregivers. This generalization has slightly changed over time but more often one hears of the deadbeat dad leaving the mother high and dry than the other way around. Also women must carry a child for nine months. That alone is reason enough. It's her body, no one should have control over that.

In regards to whether one has a right to reproduce, I believe everyone does. Overpopulation and ignorance are problems but taking away a right is a slippery slope. Especially a right as basic as reproduction.