Over at 3 Quarks Daily, a spirited discussion is under way regarding the morality of informed parents giving birth to biological children when the world is becoming over-populated, strapped for resources and there is an abundance of poor, malnourished and orphaned children in the world.
Tauriq Moosa's orginal provocative post here.
Nicholas Smyth's rebuttal here.
Moosa's response to Smyth and other commenters here.
My advice to all concerned would be: Go ahead and do what you must, whether it be having children, not having them, adopting, not adopting. You (or your doppelganger) could always try out an alternate path in an alternate universe. Assuming that there’s an alternate universe (or more), of course;)
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Our youngest grandchild just turned one year old and like all grandchildren is perfect in every way. Her mom has yet to meet the man she wants to marry but was able to experience motherhood with the help of a registered donor. He was selected from a list which furnished background information, including childhood photos, family history, and even a recorded interview to hear the sound of his voice and Southern accent. There is an online registry for half-siblings and last night we saw photos via Facebook of twin newborns from that group, children we may very well never see in person. We live now in a very different world from that in which we were born. It will be interesting to see what genealogy charts will look like in coming years.
The over-population trope is overplayed in my opinion. Just a few days ago I came across a piece by RGE (the Nouriel Roubini people) projecting an expected population stabilization, perhaps a decline, in China! Who knew?
This came as a surprise to me.
…we examine evidence that official data have underestimated Chinese urbanization and income growth—factors typically associated with delayed childbearing and fewer births per woman—which may mean fertility rates have been falling more sharply than the consensus estimate. If the national census in November finds that fertility rates in the early 2000s were lower than assumed, China’s rebalancing may be more drastic, costly and sudden than is commonly expected.
Currently, the most detailed picture of China’s past, present and future population comes from the U.S. Census Bureau’s December 2009 update to the International Data Base. The bureau assumes that China’s total fertility rate (TFR) fell below the replacement rate of about 2.2 in 1991 and stabilized at 1.5 in 2001. In line with this estimate, the bureau projects that the population of 15- to 29-year-olds will peak at 328.96 million in 2011 and contract to 322.63 million in 2012 before falling to 262.25 million in 2020. The consistent growth of this demographic has provided China with an abundant source of cheap labor, which particularly has benefited China’s manufacturing centers along the coast. As the supply of youthful workers shrinks, wages should rise and imports of labor-saving technologies should accelerate—both positives for domestic and global rebalancing. Higher wages should translate into higher rates of consumption and the shift of some production offshore, which should contribute to a smaller trade surplus.
But if China’s urbanization and income growth since 2000 have been more rapid than the government data reflect, the fertility rate may not have been as steady as the U.S. Census Bureau estimates. Government coercion in the 1970s and ‘80s—especially the latter, after the official adoption of the one-child policy—certainly pushed down the TFR. In the 1990s, though, fertility in urban areas fell well below the rates that a strict enforcement of the policy would have implied. Rapid urbanization and income improvement since 2000—even according to government data that use a narrow definition of “urban” and overlook unofficial income—suggest the TFR may not have remained stable outside of China’s main urban centers either.
Partly due to the demographic transition, China’s potential growth rate is likely to decline over the next decade….
The conversation at 3Quarks didn’t interest me much. Our energies are better spent looking for ways to care for others at the family and community level instead of engineering the population. Floods and earthquakes will take out more lives than discussions among scholars, as well as the impact of culture and politics. I will achieve more than they by having a positive influence on a single new grandchild.
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Somehow this year’s Nobel Prize winner for medicine puzzles into this discussion but I’m not sure how.
http://bit.ly/cFJ6WW
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John, I had left the link to the news of in-vitro fertilization pioneer, Robert G. Edwards winning the Nobel Prize in medicine this year in my first comment to Tauriq’s second post. I think it does play into the debate as it reflects the lengths to which people will go to have biological children.
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If Tauriq’s navel gaze is philosophical, then so is my recipe for lasagna. Most teens and young adults think about parenthood in similarly anxious terms. Tauriq may be correct to emphasize the irrational nature (clever oxymoron there) of having children, if that is in fact what he is doing. Procreation and raising kids is irrational. Ask any parent. What, then, does a peculiarly paternalistic variety of philosophical musing have to do with it?
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Without having read any of their posts and without having thought about this at any length — ethically, yeah. But that’s like saying that ethically we should be vegans — most of us aren’t. Or, maybe a closer example, like saying that ethically we should reduce our carbon footprints beyond what’s absolutely necessary and donate all our excess money beyond what’s absolutely necessary to charity. People don’t live that way and it’s too much to ask.
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If one wants to go to ethical extremes, the question would be “Why exist at all?”. That’s taking the Buddhist statement of ‘Life is full of suffering’ to the extreme conclusion that anything else that could contribute to ‘suffering’, even life itself, is morally wrong.
I use ‘life’ here in the sense of the Kahlil Gibran poem:
“Your children are not your children,
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but are not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.”
That’s what children are, to many of us who have children without thinking too much about it.
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I asked the same question that Joe did in one of my comments.
Sujatha: In the final analysis, I would interpret Tauriq’s position as very similar to the Buddhist one you describe. Many Hindus too have a similar view of life. That our mortal existence on earth is a penance for past sins, hence it is pain and suffering, something akin to doing time in prison. The Hindu ascetic too aspires for a stage in the continuum of birth, death and rebirth that will free the perfect human from being born.
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