Here’s the situation (a real one, experienced by my sister in law)
There’s a young married couple (mid 20’s). The husband finds out that he has a rare and nasty form of cancer. I’m making these numbers up, but just for argument’s sake let’s say he has a 40% chance of dying within 5 years and 70% chance of dying within 10 years.
He and his wife have always wanted children. Is it irresponsible of them to purposely get pregnant?
On the one hand, the child has a high risk of growing up fatherless. But that’s not the worst thing in the world.
The wife in this situation wants a baby, and if she doesn’t have one with her husband, she may not ever.
But is it fair to bring a child into the world who has a parent with a probably terminal disease?
Would you feel different if it were the mother with a deadly cancer?
Prior to modern medicine (i.e. pre-WW2) one parent or both often did die before the child reached maturity, though typically from influenza, typhoid, cholera and other mundane diseases.
Irresponsible? Nah, unless they rather stupidly leave issues like wills and whatnot unresolved.
Here’s a similar story. My wife’s cow-orker, a single woman who has had breast cancer, has adopted two children, from Romania IIRC. My wife and I have discussed the morality of this. In her favor, the kids so far have a better life than they otherwise would have.
Not every parent is able to bring a child into the world in an ideal situation, so if these people want a child and can take care and love this child, and arrange for this child’s care after the parents are gone…
It would not be irresponsible of them to have a child, but it would be irresponsible of them to not make sufficient plans for the future. If the role of the father, in this particular case, is to provide financial support, then it must be decided how the financial support will be handled when he dies. If the role is to be care provider, then how will the childs’ care be provided for when he dies, etc.
If no one brought a child into this world under less than ideal circumstances, the human race would be short-lived indeed.
Ok, if we say people who are too “old” can’t have children, and people who are too sick can’t have children, using the reasoning that the child might end up parentless, where do we draw the line? Cops and firemen have dangerous jobs, so let’s exclude them from having children as well. You never know when the cop will be shot at, or the fireman might not make it out of the burning building, so it’s obviously unfair to their children that their parents are putting their lives at risk, and potentially leaving those children without parents. Does anyone have hard statistics on traffic fatalities? Dangerosa’s friend isn’t the only one to die in a car accident, and we all know driving is pretty risky. Maybe we shouldn’t let people with driver’s licences…Life is full of peril, and given that we’ve yet to determine exactly when a person will die, things like this are a slippery slope indeed.
My parents were very old when they had children (my father was 55 when he got married, 69 when my younger brother was born).
My parents didn’t INTEND to have kids (my brothers and I were all ‘accidents’) so in that sense, my parents weren’t really in the same boat as the folks mentioned in the opening post, who are trying to have children.
And while being old is not the same thing as having a terminal illness, both have a high probability of leaving a relatively young child without a parent.
My long-held, personal opinion is that it is irresponsible to intentionally have children when you’re as old as my father was. So by extension, I would (guardedly) express the same opinion about a terminally ill person.
More important though: if I did find myself facing parenthood at an advanced age (or with a terminal illness), I would make DAMN sure to establish relationships with people I trusted, who were willing to take on various roles in helping raise the children if need be.
I’m not referring here to two full-time parents necessarily, but more of a network (‘it takes a village’, if you will) – I feel VERY lucky that when I was growing up, I found my way to a number of role models nearby who were fairly stable and sane. And I can attest that boys growing up fatherless map onto whatever adult is around, often with disastrous results.
For an aged or ill parent to not establish these relationships would indeed be irresponsible.
How do you know it’s a shorter life expectancy until it’s over?
Lots of people beat the odds.
(For a humorous example of this, read “The Milagro Beanfield War.”)
And, besides, there seems to be an assumption that we can tell who will live longer and who will die sooner with a degree of certainty. I don’t think that we can.
And even if we could—what other people do is none of our business.
They don’t have to justify their choices to us. Free country and all that.
I am not Jewish, but I believe there is a law in the Old Testament called the levirate, that says that if a married man dies without leaving children, then it is his brother’s responsibility to impregnate the widow, so that the man’s bloodline will continue.