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I have never had children.
I have raised a child, a boy from my wife's first marriage; however, I
have never created one of my own. It's not that I don't like children.
It's just that I have never felt the need to project my genes down the
corridors of time.
People sometimes ask me if I regret never having had any children of my
own, and the answer is still "no". However, a related question has been
niggling at me for some time: Is there any moral justification for having
children in the first place? In other words, is procreation inherently
immoral?
I haven't dared ask this of any of my friends and acquaintances for fear
of their (probably intemperate) reaction. So to research the question
myself, I entered "morality of having children" into an Internet search
engine. I was disappointed by the results. Virtually all of answers added
an extension to the question, e.g. "morality of having children if you are
too poor to properly care for them", "the morality of having children if
your country is over-populated", the "morality of having children if so
doing would risk the life of the mother", and so on. But no one seemed
prepared to grapple with the fundamental question itself. Is there any
moral justification for having children, whatever the circumstances?
I am certain that other people must have thought about this; however, they
seem to be keeping their opinions to themselves. Or perhaps I am wrong.
Perhaps the presumption of having children is so ingrained in the human
psyche that asking such a question really hasn't occurred to anyone else.
If this is the case, stand by to make history because here come my
thoughts on the matter.
There are two fundamental ways of approaching the question, from the
religious point of view of religion and the non-religious point of view.
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Religious Aspects of Procreation
Not being a religious scholar, I am going to limit this part of the
discussion mainly to the Judeo-Christian concepts of religion. People
brought up in the Judeo-Christian traditional all know about God's
biblical injunction to "be fruitful and multiply". And we certainly have
been doing so.
Human population growth over the past hundred years has been truly
phenomenal. The world's population, which stood at only 2.5 billion in
1950, had doubled to 5 billion by 1990, and passed 6 billion just before
the end of the century. As of March 2009, the estimated world population
had already reached 6.8 billion. In other words, we have already added
another 800 million souls in less than ten years.
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People raised in the
Judeo-Christian tradition are also aware of the biblical assertion that we
are all born into sin and that this sin must be expiated. If we are
successful in doing so, we ascend to eternal bliss in heaven. If not, we
descend to eternal torment in hell.
Most Christians are convinced that their children will of course ascend to
heaven. However, this is by no means certain; every soul that comes into
the world must inexorably face the prospect of being cast down into hell.
I know that Jesus is supposed to have died for our sins. I also know that
unless we believe this and accept Him as our personal savior, we cannot
enter the kingdom of heaven. Clearly, not everyone believes this, which
means that each day thousands of babies come into the world for whom
heaven will be eternally barred and hell will be eternally open.
While most loving parents shudder at the thought of exposing their
children any kind of physical danger, they seem perfectly willing to
expose them to the greatest danger imaginable, eternal damnation.
Can this possibly be moral?
Non-religious Aspects of Procreation
Suppose you don't believe the stories of heaven and hell. What then? Even
if you don't take responsibility for a child's eternal well-being, you
must still take responsibility for his temporal well-being. Once again,
the prospects are disconcerting.
Even before he is born, a child faces the possibility of physical
malformation, mental retardation, or congenital disease. In some parts of
the world, the risk is very low; however, there is always a risk. Any
loving parent would surely prevent a child from eating a piece of candy
picked up off the ground for fear that it might make him ill. Yet the
self-same loving parent perfectly willing to risk a lifetime of illness
for the child by virtue of forcing him to be born.
As the child grows, he must constantly face the prospect of violence, war,
poverty, oppression, drought, famine, pestilence, and the hundreds of
other ills man is heir to. Even if he is lucky enough to escape all of
these, he still must confront the aches, pains, feebleness of mind and
body, and other distasteful attributes of old age, unless of course he is
fortunate enough to die young.
In short, whether you are religious or not, the decision to procreate
would seem to be an act of high insensitivity, if not actually immorality.
To repeat, I have never created a child of my own. Given the foregoing
considerations, I am not fully certain of what I feel about people who
have created a child or children of their own; however, I am strongly
leaning towards disapproval.
Because I am now in my seventh decade, the thought of procreating, while
still technically feasible, would seem highly unadvisable. Instead, I am
ineluctably thinking more and more about what I might wish to have
inscribed on my tombstone. I haven't yet made up my mind, but I am leaning
towards the following:
Dear God, if God there be, Know this to be my legacy, My sins
were many, Yet blame I shun,
For I have never inflicted life on anyone. |
