Why no children?

At thirty-six years old, I have no children of my own. It is likely that I never will.

There have always been children in my life, of course: the offspring of my sisters and of my other friends. I know quite a few people now who are in their early 20’s who I first met as toddlers, barely able to walk. But sometimes people ask me if I will ever “settle down”.

Well, we have here the makings of a philosophical problem. Let’s look at it like this.

People want to bear their own children for a wide variety of reasons.
1. Some feel as if they will be incomplete as adults if they have not at least tried to start their own family. Or, they will point to the inherently fulfilling nature of the relationship between parents and children (assuming the family is not dysfunctional.)
2. Some desire children in order to achieve a kind of vicarious immortality: a child will carry on the parent’s name into the future, and perhaps also the story of his life and his values.
3. Some may want children in order to have caregivers in their old age, thinking it better to be cared for by his or her family than by unrelated nurses and doctors.
4. Some desire children because they want someone to love and someone to love them in return, and they know that a child will do that (at least for a while!).
5. Some may think that parenthood fulfills a primary moral claim of religion, such as “be fruitful and multiply”.
6. Finally, some people feel a kind of internal driving urge to have a child. One friend of mine and recent mother told me, “Everything in my body was telling me to have a child. I couldn’t sleep right until my boyfriend agreed to be a father.”

Of course, there are any number of ways to gain these benefits without having children.
1. You can gain a sense of completeness as an adult, and a sense of an inherently fulfilling life, through excellence in almost any kind of meaningful and productive work, such as in material craftsmanship, or athletics, or the arts. Parenthood is only one of many possibilities here.
2. You can gain vicarious immortality by other ways besides parenthood: for instance, you could write a book. Furthermore, the vicarious immortality of parenthood isn’t guaranteed anyway. If, in your own life, you don’t fully carry forward your own parent’s values, then you probably cannot expect a child of yours to carry your values forward either.
3. As for creating children to be one’s old-age caregivers: your children might expect that you made your own preparations for retirement (such as by investing in a pension plan) and may resent being asked to act as caregivers.
4. The desire for unconditional love can be fulfilled in a healthy adult-to-adult relationship. And in other kinds of relationships. Some people I know experience unconditional love from their dogs and their horses.
5. A religious reason to have a child will have to contend with the higher-order problems associated with following any religious rules at all. Sometimes it is not clear what the gods are telling you to do. It is also possible that even if the religious rules are clear, they might still be irrational. The Euthyphro Dilemma comes to mind as an argument that puts the rationality of religious rules to the test.
6. Finally, an urge to have a child is not a reason to have a child: to claim otherwise is to fall back on emotivism. (In a similar way: I might have an urge to take revenge upon someone who stole something from me, but that is not a reason to hurt him.) Moreover, just because I am biologically capable of fathering a child, it doesn’t follow that I must do so. To claim otherwise is to commit the naturalistic fallacy, or to accept some kind of biological determinism.

Overall, there are no reasons I can think of which create absolutely binding obligations on everyone to bear children and become parents.

But none of the criticisms here are strong reasons to not have children. Furthermore, I can think of at least one decent reason to create families which can’t be satisfied by other means: bearing children perpetuates the human race. It would be a great tragedy if the whole human race decided at the same time to have no more children, and make the present generation the last in history. Such a decision might be tantamount to misanthropy: it would be like deciding that the human race shouldn’t go on. But the flourishing life cannot entertain that kind of misanthropy. It has to have confidence in life, confidence in the future and in the next generation. It has to find or invent reasons why life is ethically desirable. Starting a family and raising a child is a practical way to do that. The decision to conceive and bear a child affirms life by creating more life.

I find this a compelling proposition, although I find it hard to see how that proposition can create binding obligations on everyone. The value at stake is the affirmation of life: the creation of children and families, and the perpetuation of the human race into the future, is only one way among many to fulfill that value. Although I find that parenthood is a very good and praiseworthy thing, indeed I find that it is a sacred thing, I simply cannot see any strong moral or logical reason to condemn people who choose to remain childless. To use an analogy: society may need doctors, and you can affirm life by taking up one of the healing professions. But it doesn’t follow that everyone is morally obliged to study medicine. It is good enough that some of us, but not all of us, become doctors. It should be good enough that some of us, but not all of us, become parents.

Of course, the original question is left standing: will I, personally, ever have children? The answer is, probably not. I will continue to enjoy being an uncle to my nine nieces and nephews, and to the children of some of my friends. I am part of “the village” in which some children are raised. And for now, that seems good enough for me.