The human race nears extinction--is forcing a woman to give birth acceptable?

Great Debates
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People insist on more generations because we believe we are on balance good and that our lives are worth living. Only a small minority regrets having been born. We know that if we produce another generation, they too will generally consider themselves good and not regret having been born. Through a temporal veil of ignorance, it is good to produce as many happy future generations as possible.

If there is no future for mankind, then the restraints of moral obligation begin to erode. Not everyone will immediately abandon their values and start looting and wanton descent into libertinism and such, but the “to hell with it” factor becomes more and more compelling over time. The world becomes an increasingly negative-sum game: who gets to enjoy themselves the most before the end? The old no longer have a real obligation to the young.

Creeping back to the original point of the thread…
Performing a very small number of evil deeds to ensure that the only known intelligent life in the universe doesn’t disappear along with all its accumulated knowledge and culture… I’m pro-choice right up to there, and then I say “tough luck.”

Human beings typically (but not always) place a high value on children (even those that aren’t our own), it’s pretty well hard-wired into us. We automatically feel protective anxiety when we hear a child crying, which is why it can be the most annoying thing in the world to hear a child cry and not be in a position to do anything about it.

There may be a small percentage of people who do not feel that anxiety: hard-core sociopaths and temporarily insane people. And the vast majority of sociopaths could probably even be bargained with: people would no doubt offer mountains of riches to make the last fertile woman their baby mama or (eventually) part of their extended family. But there might be a tiny number who simply will not want to be pregnant for any amount of honor, love, power or material reward.

If the last remaining fertile woman (or a small number of women) happen to be in that super-misanthropic minority, the rest of the human race is going to have its way with her (to put it brutally).

Rationalizations for this behavior that would in normal times be considered barbaric: [ul][li] Only a small minority of people regret having been born. The happiness of all those future people is not merely a “potential” but a choice: do we coerce one empathy-challenged person now so that many can live?[/li][li] A small number of evil acts is the vice that all future virtue requires. Mankind has always been willing to engage in temporary evils to secure a better future.[/li][*] Desperate times call for desperate measures. Our descendants will be able to live better lives, free from these awful choices, if we make those choices. After all, our ancestors thousands of years ago were barbaric almost by default, and we’ve created beautiful wondrous things in such a short period of time… we have developed so far that we can imagine curing poverty, hunger and illness for all if we get just a little more time to do it. Just because our ancestors were barbaric doesn’t mean we don’t deserve to live. And that tells us that just because we have to be barbaric in this unique circumstance doesn’t mean they’ll inherit our sins, but you can bet they’ll inherit our virtues.[/ul] This doesn’t lead down a slippery slope to rape and forced pregnancy as policy in normal times. In normal times, a rape or (if you subscribe to pro-choice logic)forced pregnancy very likely degrades society in addition to harming the immediate victim, and there are plenty of children born into supportive families who can go on being happy and having their own children. But in a misanthrope-fertile-woman Children of Men scenario, those things are necessary to preserve and eventually improve society.

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And clearly I’ve spent too much time in America now, because I’m spelling honour without a u.

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We wouldn’t be talking about a “tiny number”, or the problem wouldn’t exist. We’d have to be talking about the great majority of womankind refusing under any inducement to become pregnant. So; we are talking about three billion women reduced to sexual slavery, which is NOT a “tiny number”. And we are talking about probably killing hundreds of millions of men who will try to defend them. And what kind of society do you expect to result from that?

[quote=“Voxicitis, post:301, topic:508671”]

[li] Desperate times call for desperate measures. Our descendants will be able to live better lives, free from these awful choices, if we make those choices.[/li][/quote]
They won’t be MY descendents; they will all be the descendents of rapists and murderers. Living in a society created by and for the benefit of rapists and murderers, and them alone. So I doubt the female half of the population will be living pleasant lives. And the men will continue to make those “awful choices”, because they will be awful men from a long line of awful men. The good men all die without children in this scenario.

No; all our virtues will be destroyed, and only the evil and their victims will survive. To the extent that moral behavior is genetic it will be partially at least be bred out of the species, as will the capacity for empathy in males.

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In Children of Men all women (except one, it turns out… maybe more that we don’t see) are rendered mysteriously infertile. So it’s a tiny number.

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But in that scenario there’s no point since one or a tiny number isn’t going to save civilization. Nor are they unwilling to have children, just unable.

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When did this become about the U.S.? I thought this was about the HUMAN RACE, as per the O.P. If we have extinction issues solely in the U.S., then we just need to relax the immigration standards, and this whole debate is completely irrelevant. We’re talking about saving the human race, though. That’s a human thing, not a U.S. thing. You’re not talking about the same thing we’re talking about, apparently.

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The thread is about what would happen if there was only one or a small number of women able to give birth, and they were unwilling: would it then be acceptable to force them to give birth.

I think we could potentially save civilization if there was only one woman able to give birth, although there’d be a much higher-than-usual likelihood of genetic problems early on. Much of our infrastructure might decay as we started to die off and slowly repopulate, but we could preserve a lot of very valuable things that would get civilization back on track without a descent into true Dark Ages.

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If the movie had been more rational, the real focus would be to medically study the pregnant woman at length in hopes of discovering (and then medically extending) whatever principal allowed her to overcome the mass sterility.

Of course being an unwilling medical guinea pig is already pretty bad, and being unwillingly pregnant just makes it worse.

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No, because it would be evil, and just futilely heap deliberate evil on top of extinction. Basically, as someone upthread said you’d just have a tiny last generation that knew it was wholly the product of rape.

No, we’d have a civilization worse than a Dark Age, assuming that extinction didn’t happen anyway. Not even the Dark Ages were populated wholly by rapists. Not even the Dark Ages were composed of nothing but the dregs of mankind and their victims.

As I said earlier; I see no point in “saving” humanity by turning into something that I’d prefer to see killed. Would you take a lifesaving medicine if it would turn you into a serial killing sociopath?

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[quote=“Voxicitis, post:301, topic:508671”]

[li] Desperate times call for desperate measures. Our descendants will be able to live better lives, free from these awful choices, if we make those choices. After all, our ancestors thousands of years ago were barbaric almost by default, and we’ve created beautiful wondrous things in such a short period of time… we have developed so far that we can imagine curing poverty, hunger and illness for all if we get just a little more time to do it. Just because our ancestors were barbaric doesn’t mean we don’t deserve to live. And that tells us that just because we have to be barbaric in this unique circumstance doesn’t mean they’ll inherit our sins, but you can bet they’ll inherit our virtues.[/LIST] This doesn’t lead down a slippery slope to rape and forced pregnancy as policy in normal times. In normal times, a rape or (if you subscribe to pro-choice logic)forced pregnancy very likely degrades society in addition to harming the immediate victim, and there are plenty of children born into supportive families who can go on being happy and having their own children. But in a misanthrope-fertile-woman Children of Men scenario, those things are necessary to preserve and eventually improve society.[/li][/QUOTE]

This is like something out of an episode of Outer Limits, and you’re the ruler justifying some sort of breeding camp. Don’t forget – those shows always have a twist ending.

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Big twist - all the resulting children are jerks.

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Also…THEY’RE HITLER!

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You’re assuming that all the children sired in this manner would also have to resort to rape?

I see one victim here, unless all the children born to this woman also reproduce entirely through rape. Do you think hyper-misanthropy is an entirely inherited trait?

Why do you have it in for the children of rapists? Are you assuming that all subsequent generations would have to rape and be raped to continue humanity? Why do you make that assumption based on what I said?

Consider how high the probability is that back in our distant (or for some people not-so-distant) past we all have ancestors who were the products of rape. We did not inherit their sins, and the fact of our lineage does not make us the dregs of humanity. We can choose to be better than they were, just as the generations following our little twisted scenario would be able to.

Maybe, but the consequences of not doing this isolated horrible thing make for a pretty predictable and sad ending: we’re all dead, and our accumulated knowledge and culture die with us.

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If there’s only one woman capable of reproducing, how many kids is she going to be expected/forced to have? What if she has all boys? And if she has girls – at what age will they be ‘tested’ for fertility themselves?

I am still in a sci-fi state of mind, but I still think they’re valid questions.

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Some people are apparently misunderstanding me and what I believe is the idea behind this thread. In Children of Men, there was one fairly young lady who was still fertile. This was after 18 years with no children born anywhere in the world.

The thread asks, if the last fertile woman in the world (or, for argument’s sake, a small number of fertile women) was absolutely unwilling to give birth, would it be acceptable to force her to do so?

As I see it, this does not require that all subsequent generations be forced to give birth or that her daughters all be raped. This scenario has one clear victim.

In terms of plausibility of success, success is probably assumed by the original thread, to clarify the moral problem. But for argument’s sake, could civilization be saved? Using smart genetics (aiming for maximum genetic variability) and assuming we poured our efforts into protecting the health and security of the new generations, I think humanity would have a shot: there’s still another several decades before the last man of the previous generation died, which humanity could spend trying to create a suitable environment for the new generation, including preserving as much knowledge and culture as possible.

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Sci-fi state of mind is necessary for this thought experiment, I think.

My assumption is that a hyper-misanthropic First Mother would be forced to have as many children as possible with maximum genetic variability and health among the fathers. Pretty horrible thought.

If she had all boys, that would be the end of it, of course. If she had girls, I assume that a society aiming for survival would try to minimize the chance of complications from pregnancy that would endanger further reproduction, so they would discourage starting the girls too young. But there’s no reason I can see that this society would have to resort to rape with the subsequent generations.

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They’d be raised by rapists, and taught that rape was the proper way to deal with women. And most like told how women are all evil and deserve abuse. You can’t set up a situation where only the monsters reproduce without the result being a monstrous society.

Not all were the result of rape; probably not even most. And it still resulted in a society twisted with hatred for women; a society that HAD to demonize them in order to justify its own behavior towards them in a self perpetuating cycle. A cycle that would inevitably be in place in Rapetopia, and to a greater extent.

But the consequences of doing this horrible thing is that the only parts that survive would be the parts that should be destroyed.

Because the women would collectively loathe men. And because they’d do it whether they needed to or not.

Really; I’m reminded of the debate over torture, where the pro-torture side generally seems to think there are moral, decent people who’ll torture only out of sheer necessity, be calmly professional about it all, and then go back to being nice afterwards. When in reality it is a job that only monsters will do, with the inevitable results being pointless sadism. This is the same thing; ONLY the worst of men will engage in rape, so it will be performed in the most brutal and sadistic way possible. And they will raise the resulting children to be just as bad, because that’s the kind of men they are. These postulated men who will rape all these women more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger and then treat women nicely otherwise do not exist.

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Well, the implicit assumption there is that the fathers get to raise their children. That wouldn’t necessarily be the case.

While there’s a ways to go, I still think we’ve made a lot of progress. Don’t you?

I don’t want to respond without understanding what you mean here. Please explain.

I don’t know that the Daughters would ever have to learn about how they came to be.

I 100% believe that torture should be banned as policy, full stop (unless you can come up with a scenario as absurd as this one, where a small number of tortures is absolutely necessary to save civilization). Again, I don’t think that the men selected to impregnate the First Mother would ever necessarily be allowed to see their children. Or that they would necessarily be allowed to “rape” the First Mother, if artificial insemination is a possibility.

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How are you going to enforce this ignorance? Obviously if them getting pregnant is going to be vital to reviving the human race (a goal you’ve decided to resort to extreme measures to reach), they’ll need to find out how sexual reproduction works. From there, unless you cause a good deal of brain damage or use a staggeringly oppressive program of anti-education, they will figure out that something’s going on. Add in the social programming you’d need to include (high amounts of indoctrination that they have to make babies, and suppressing any thought that they might not want that for themselves) for generations as the population base is rebuilt.

Not to mention, they’ll know how they came to be because it’ll be almost guarenteed to be repeated. Remember, the human race is still facing extinction during these girls’ generation, so we can’t possibly allow them to refuse to make more babies. We already made that decision, so there’s no turning back from it when the situation hasn’t meaningfully changed. You won’t take “no” for an answer. They are designated broodmares, and there will be no reason to bother with niceties like consent. Indeed, consent will be litterally impossible for these girls, since even a “yes” is utterly meaningless when you have no intention of respecting a “no”.

This isn’t a one-shot event we’re discussing here. If you want any hope of rebuilding the species, this is a culture.

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Who’s going to tell them “no”? They are going to be the ones who were powerful and ruthless enough to kill or subjugate everyone who opposed them before they began their rape campaign.

I’m saying that a society built by and for the most ruthless vile, evil men isn’t going to bother preserving much that I’d consider of value. They are going to be something out of The Handmaid’s Tale or worse.

They’ll probably be told how, before they are raped themselves, and in between beatings. Again, you assume a level of decency that simply isn’t going to exist. They are going to be the slaves of woman hating monsters.