The “unethical” myth about having children

More and more people are wondering whether it's ethical to have children

It's a consideration that seems somewhat new to our time. After all, in past years, having children was the default, not having children was looked down upon

But in our current social climate, and our physical climate too, which does feel like it's deteriorating

There's a sense of fatalism, a fear that bringing someone new into the world might be a bad thing

I don't actually feel that this is the case. When it comes to climate change in particular, I don't know that we're making the world better by having less of a stake in it

So what are the risks of not having enough children? They're kind of the straightforward economic ones

Children end up being the caretakers of the adults. that came before them

If you want someone to pay into Social Security say so that you can retire when you older there does have to be someone existing to do that a child who is born after you You seeing the effects of this in countries like Japan and South Korea where birth rates have

fallen dramatically and now the elderly outnumber the young. It's not a pretty scene

But I also don't necessarily think that we can, or should, have children just to be insured

of our social security payments or under the assumption that they, will be forced to take care of us while they're old

There's also something to having children as a way to invest in society in a less monetary way

Often those with children and children themselves have kind of a stake in the future

You are in fact tied to society by virtue of your love and your family

Having children can make us more invested in the world, not less. Often when people ask, should I have children in the face of climate change or a bad presidency

they not really asking about children so much as whether there is hope for the future whether they should be completely fatalistic about the climate or politics or gun violence in schools

whether in fact the human condition is an inexorable decline. But the thing is, life actually is getting better, and it has gotten better

Before 1800, the average lifespan was around 30 years. Now it's above 70

In our current moment, the voices of people who hadn't been heard in the past are now being heard

changes happening rapidly. Technological advances that we actually can't even think of have the power to shape our future

The Marxist thinker, Frederick Jameson, is credited with saying, it's easier to believe in the end of the world than the end of capitalism

And I think there's something similar at play in our conception of the future. It's very easy to imagine how

things can go wrong, it's harder for us to imagine how things might go right, what it would look like if things improve

And in fact there lots of evidence that things are improving and may well continue to do so It is certainly easy to feel that the climate is falling apart that our political situation is

bad or stagnant, maybe even getting worse. But this is also a failure of our own imagination

political and otherwise. It is in fact possible that change can happen, that our children

won't live in the present that we live in. And that actually might be a reason for hope

The philosopher Hannah Arendt uses the term natality to describe the possibility inherent in the prospect of birth

There is the potential for change. There is a potential for the world to be better than it is in our time

A new person, a new thing, threatens to upend the current order of things and perhaps even improve it

Having a child can in some sense be a statement of faith and also a mode of change

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