"Because I want to" has always seemed like really flimsy reasoning when it comes to the act of having children. Creating a person, who will be depending on you for everything, not just genetics but raising and molding who they are, and then they will live through all the anguishes of life exactly as you are, until they themselves create on offspring or die... the gravity of that choice seems so significant that I'm stunned that people make it so routinely, and at that why pregnancy is heralded at all as a good thing worth celebration.
Miracle of life has a time window, make the choice or never make it; it's a beautiful thing that life seeps through the cracks of a hostile universe full of so much anguish - in life there is so much possibility. We as humans are informational sluts just seeking more information, but we're more than that - cos the information search must be passed down to future generations. To that end we are crafted by evolution to continue on that path, that we are here is a testament to the countless people who banged before us, with all their joys and melancholy
That's fucking awesome
Shit, if I could go back in time, I'd kill my mother to prevent her from giving birth to me, committing suicide by paradox. She's just always been one of those people who shouldn't have been allowed to have children.
You should make this into a sick book or something, I'd read it
Is that not unfair to the hypothetical child, who didn't ask to be born?
Speaking from my personal experience, wherein I was an accidental birth born to two parents whose deficiencies I knew well, I'm glad as all hell I wasn't aborted
I didn't ask for any of this, but I'm here and I'm going to live :
D
Unsustainable growth. We're already well past the point where everyone on the planet can live in an industrialized or post-industrial society. If each person has two children from their own loins who survive to adulthood, that's a slight net increase in global population (due to medical advancements increasing life expectancy). Allow three maximum because some people will only ever have one, some will never reproduce or die before they can, &c. and you're still holding steady.
It's a bit of an issue though, because the only countries that have decreasing populations are industrialized countries and their share of the world population is insignificant; moreover they have created systems that require growing populations whilst ignoring that developing nations have the fastest population growth by far. Thus in developed nations this is a meaningless conundrum, because if you do it for ethical reasons you're just gonna have a growing population anyways because all industrialized nations are pro-immigration, so all you've done is removed yourself from the genepool and ended your family. I see this from a different perspective, if I have more kids in an industrialized nation they're going to have more opportunities born into a better life than most other people on the planet, and they will inherit a greater share of the world from the families who don't have kids of their own
It's socially reprehensible to have more than ~2 children in your lifetime because you're directly contributing to resource depletion, pollution, and myriad other problems. Tragedy of the Commons at work, with the whole Earth as the field in question.
Haha, resources, pollution and such are not problems that can't be solved by humans
Like just look at how much pollution per person is made in the USA vs in Sweden vs in Mongolia
Teaching your children to not be wastrels and to be innovators vs eliminating your family in vain, I see nothing ethical about that
*EDIT
Lol, much the same @Th4DwArfY1, did not see the new posts
maybe we should just make a sick new thread about the ethics of family making and shit