Is it ethical to have children?

Lack of contraception may produce unplanned children

Question: Is it ethical to have children?
Position‹4 of 4: Childbearing is not a moral choice
Argument‹2 of 2: Lack of contraception may produce unplanned children

Procreation becomes beyond a moral choice when women give birth to unplanned children because of unavailable or misused contraception or forced sexual intercourse. Cultural pressure may also cause women to, involuntarily, decide not to use contraception.

The argument

For any procreative decision to have ethical significance, the woman involved must have moral agency, authority, and freedom. However, this is not the case when there is a lack of contraception. Globally, 74 million women living in low and middle-income countries have unintended pregnancies annually. This situation occurs because, mainly, women lack access to contraceptive methods or contraceptive counseling. In some cases, contraception is not chosen because sex is the result of coercion or violence, such as in cases of rape. Such a situation involves a clear violation of women’s rights and integrity. Since women do not autonomously decide to have sex and get pregnant, childbearing is not open to an ethical evaluation in these cases. Besides, most cultures are pronatalist. Pronatalism is the promotion of baby-making for a nation’s social, political, and economic purposes. In pronatalist cultures, women face intense pressure to have children. This pressure leads them to choose not to use contraception. Here, childbearing is, again, not voluntary but is a result of cultural pressure. Overall, procreation is not always a choice. Therefore, only voluntary childbearing should be subject to ethical evaluation.

Premises

[P1]A procreative decision can only be subject to ethical evaluation if the woman involved has genuine moral agency, autonomy, and freedom. [P2] In many cases — including lack of access to contraception, coercion or rape, and pronatalist cultural pressure — women do not freely choose whether to bear children. [C] Therefore, childbearing in such circumstances is not a moral choice and cannot be ethically evaluated as one.

Counter-arguments

Many women, though certainly not all, with access to effective contraception can make autonomous procreative decisions. This contraceptive access is increasing in many underdeveloped countries. The rapidly declining birth rate in many countries is evidence of women to make such decisions. Philosopher Lisa Cassidy observes that even though pressures (religious, legal, and cultural) may subject many of us to emotional strain, these social pressures do not wholly co-opt reproductive choice we make. Similarly, author Corinne Maier claims that most children have been wanted children ever since the pill and the IUD. Children are no longer the unavoidable consequence of a sexual act but the product of willpower under scientific management.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The standard is set too high. Every decision is made under constraint, and requiring full autonomy before ethics can apply would remove most human choices from moral evaluation altogether. [Rejecting P2] The cases listed are not alike. Rape removes consent entirely; lack of access narrows options; cultural pressure shapes a choice that is still made. Collapsing them into one category conceals that agency remains in the latter two — and falling birth rates across many of the societies described suggest that where access exists, decisions are indeed being made.

Proponents cited

Therese Shechter
“If you're in possession of a uterus, at some point in your life you’ve likely gotten the message that having children isn’t a choice—it’s your duty. For well over a century, doctors, psychologists, and politicians have engaged in intense public campaigns to persuade American women to bear children, publicly exalting motherhood and warning of personal, and societal, peril if they don’t comply.”
Diana Tietjens Meyers
“While it would be wrong to claim that no woman ever makes a fully autonomous reproductive decision—either to have children or not to have them—the evidence of women’s testimony suggests that the women who do are exceptional ... Many child-bearing decisions are collaborative decisions that bring into play the peculiar psychodynamics of particular couples and, in many cases, the power imbalances that shadow heterosexual relationships as well.”