I don’t think the point is whether having kids will make YOU (the parent) happy. For some people it will, for some it won’t. Some people should have children, some shouldn’t. Everyone should decide for himself/herself.
But I think it’s a bad argument to say that NOBODY should have children because the children themselves will wish they had never been born.
People are different and some may not be ready for kids, but they should be encouraged to explore the path that love has for them. So many people avoid love because they think it’s sinful, and that delay could take them past childbearing years. We as a society have delayed love, by frighting kids with talk of teenage pregnancies, STD’s and pushes for abstinence and lengthening of education years. Also lying to them by making them carry around a doll that cries all the time, such as the ‘think it over baby’ doll, to make children seem a burden without the ability to feel the love and connectives of a mother and child.
A major part of people not wanting children is societally imposed by fear. It is the removal of this fear that can only be a benefit to society. And the only way to limit children is through fear.
Wow, I never expected this thread to get so long!
It’s not really about finding “fault” so much as it is doing the most we can to prevent the most suffering we can. And it is true that by not having kids, you just might be saving hundreds or even thousands of people from the suffering that is inherit in even the best of lives.
I think we should focus on taking care of what we have, but that’s not really the point I was trying to make. Go to any emergency room, and you will see the kind of suffering that your kids might be subjected to. You can say there’s a chance they might not be, and this is true, but there is also a chance that they will be. IF you have them. If you don’t have them, then they will certainly not be subjected to it, but there is no avoiding the possibility that they might be if you do.
This is true regardless of how much money you have or how good looking you think they will likely be. Anyone can be in a horrible car wreck at a young age and live most of their life paralyzed. Anyone can have some accident that causes them to become blind or deaf. Anyone can be raped or violently assaulted. Anyone can end up having severe acne or diabetes or cancer. And even the best of lives still have quite a bit of suffering - even everyday suffering such as headaches and stomach aches all add up to a person’s quota.
That’s not what I’m saying at all…
You do realize that for many, if not most, people, this isn’t the case. Soul-crushing depression and apathy isn’t the norm for most people. There’s something really wrong with your daily life; your job and mental state can be changed with help. Plus you say you have people who really care about you that you wouldn’t want to hurt.
Well, looks like all the rational positions have been staked out already, so I’ll just chime in and say that I don’t see how the supposition that to ‘impose life on someone else and force that suffering upon them is unethical’ is either rational or ‘ethical’ (whatever that term is supposed to mean). To ‘impose life’ is to grant a chance. To deny life would be to remove all chance or choice…to basically decide for someone (or for another living entity), and remove all chance or choice. To me, that is clearly as ‘unethical’ as you can get, since you are assuming you know best for not only yourself, not only for the being or person you are denying life too, but for all of the potential descendants in the future.
Certainly I’m all for people making a conscious choice to have children or not have them…that’s their look out, and if they don’t want to propagate their genes, or experience the joys and pains of parenthood, well, that’s up to them. But to state that it’s moral and ethical to NOT have children (and, by extension, for no one else too…and to take it to it’s logical conclusion of ALL life) is, well, silly.
-XT
Huh. I don’t think my 8 year-old has “suffered” a bit, though she may claim otherwise: “Remember when you got mad and didn’t let me watch Doctor Who, Daddy? I was suffering then!”
And you may as well kill all the animals too - imagine all their suffering, and them too dumb to know they can be noble by offing themselves!
ETA: Or, what Rune said. :smack:
Heh, that site is sorta like Buddhism without the whole “gain enlightenment” part - like they got the First Noble Truth, but forgot to look up the other three. 
So reach the conclusion that having a child is unethical, one must stake a claim on one of these positions:
that it’s too likely that their life will be more bad than good to take the risk of bearing them.
that any bad at all is too much bad, regardless of how much good there is. One stubbed toe devalues the life as a whole.
Most people won’t accept 2, but if they did anti-natalism is a shoo-in (and murdering everyone as soon as possible is an ethical mandate). Believing 1 is easier, depending on how unfortunate your circumstances are; however compelling arguments can be made (with examples) that people tend not to think that their lives aren’t worth living, despite what youthink about it. However if despite those arguments one still retains the firm belief that their child is doomed to a life of suffering (perhaps the kid would have some horrific disease), then in that case it would be unethical for them to continue on and have the kid.
For a not-too-out-there example of the latter, I gather that some people think it would be unethical to bear kids with their siblings due to increased risk of defects due to recessive genes.
Only to have someone poke a hole in a condom that cold December night.
You’re welcome!
You think the effort to keep kids too young to have kids from having them is preventing them from wanting to have them when it is appropriate? Have any evidence, or even examples, of this? No Dopers I can remember who don’t want kids have given this as a reason.
Taking longer to finish school - and the need to get established in a job, are both reasons I’ve seen. My daughter’s PhD advisor didn’t have a kid until she got tenure.
I don’t know what it is like now, but my mother and my wife’s mother both had a hard time having kids, and they both were under a lot of pressure to produce. (Which was good for us, since neither of them gave us any grief. Plus, we were quick about it. 
)
But today reasons not to have kids seem to be self-imposed, and not coming from social pressure, except indirectly. Hell, a living wage so that it was more possible for one parent to stay home a few years with the kids would do a lot to ease the pressure, I think.
Once you get to a certain age, you start to wonder how the hell people are going to make it through the next 50 years. When I see predictions for 2050, I worry about my kids and as yet unborn grandkids - I’ll be dead, most likely. However, that is age speaking - I was in college in the early '70s where nearly every SF story I read had the world of 2000 as an ecological and overpopulated wasteland. Didn’t bother me a bit, and it turned out I was right and the doomsayers were wrong. Anyone not having kids then because of the inevitable disaster would have been shortchanging them and their kids.
If I had listened to you before having kids, I would have missed out on so much of their joy - and we’ve been through the teenage years already. As it happened, they had the odd cold and pain and times of unhappiness, but never anything horrible. I suppose you could say we bet on their happiness, and we won big.
As for you, don’t you realize that you can get in a car crash, you can be assaulted, you can lose your mind or your abilities, you can become unemployed and starve? If you understand why you don’t give up, you might understand why people make the bet that their kids will be happy.
My parent’s generation lived through a doomsday scenario. My in-laws, for example, lived in Ukraine - they grew up during WW2, dodging Nazi and Soviet death squads and hiding from battling armies in a sort of surreal apocalyptic wasteland, to hear them describe it.
It happens. It is happening right now to some. No doubt it will happen in the future to others.
Of course I realize that. I don’t see what “giving up” has to do with anything. If you are referring to suicide, I have already stated before that suicide does not end pain but multiplies it.
You don’t know what could happen to your kids in the future. What makes you think they are immune from the horrors of the world? They aren’t. And you likely don’t know of everything they’ve been through either. Everyone always acts like they gave their kids perfect lives, when most parents I know treat their kids like absolute crap.
Not to mention how every time their kid experiences suffering, that “wasn’t their fault” but every bit of a joy in their life and every “positive trait” can be directly traced back to them.
EVERYONE suffers in their life. This includes happy people.
Well, that’s what being a parent is like - you never know.
I never claimed their lives are perfect - nobody’s life is perfect. However I suspect they both would say that they on the whole had good lives, with more joy than suffering. They are also both grown up and out of the house - and are eager to talk to us all the time, so I don’t think they feel they were raised badly. In fact they are at that stage of their lives where their parents start getting smarter.
Not everyone has good parents, but I think a majority of kids we know do. Oddly, the kids we know who suffer the most were adopted by their parents, and they suffer because of a bad prenatal environment. Still they suffer less than they would if they had been left with a drunk or addicted mother, I suspect.
As for you, you appear to believe in a version of the 3 laws of thermodynamics - you can’t win in life, you can’t break even in life, and getting out of the game makes things worse. I don’t. Let’s forget what you are going to do about it - do you think that the rest of your life will, on balance, be miserable?
BTW, there have been studies comparing happiness, and people who you’d think should be miserable because of illness are actually quite happy. It appears to be more a matter of personality than a matter of circumstance. Of course each of us will suffer at least a bit, but each of us will also be happy more than just a bit. As Roger Miller said, “You can’t roller skate in a buffalo herd, but you can be happy if you’ve a mind to.”
many women who desire to have children, but are beyond childbearing age.
Same thing is Eve was decieve by the serpent, desirable for gaining wisdom, along with beauty and good for food (one less mouth to feed).
It should not be pressure but desire, the motivation is wrong here.
At one time one parent could provide for needs and the child’s requirement for love. Now it is that two incomes did the same as onje used to, except the child does not get the continual Love as before. yes s/he may have a PlayStation 5.1 but it is Love of a parent s/her needs and is being denied.
Voyager made an analogy to betting and that’s quite right. The difference between living your own life and having children is the difference between betting with your own money versus someone else’s. Everyone suffers and dies, leaving behind distraught loved ones. The only question is how much suffering there will be on the way to death.
In stark contrast, the unborn aren’t inconvenienced whatsoever by not being born. We know this because we were unborn for 13 billion years.
I’m an atheist, but antinatalism is even more urgent if you believe in punishment during the afterlife. It’s quite possible, especially in this era, that your children will stray from the truth and be burnt in everlasting hellfire. This line of thinking even has Biblicial support: Matthew 26:24 The Son of man goeth as it is written of him: but woe unto that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! it had been good for that man if he had not been born.
This paragraph doesn’t make sense unless you posit a horde of souls eager to be implanted in the newest embryo and not being born causes them to suffer. And if that is true it raises interesting implications about the responsibilities of fertile women and reproductive technology.
There is a tremendous amount of suffering in the natural world. But also such joy! When a lion rips out the throat of a gazelle she is very happy indeed.