Kids Are Alright…?

To have kids or not is so obviously a personal choice that it’s been surprising to see so much debate around it.

It seems simple, on the face of it: If you want kids, go for it. If not, that’s cool too.

Obviously though, it is not really a debate about having kids. Like many things, it is a debate about controlling people.

The aggressively natalist today make two main flavors of arguments:

• It is a large part of the purpose of everyone's life to birth and/or help raise the next generation.

• It is a demographic and/or economic imperative to have greater than replacement birth rates Both arguments are flawed in they depend upon old, largely irrelevant, paradigms.

The first is one is spiritual or philosophical, not logical. There are no facts or testable hypotheses for our purpose in life. Sometimes what they mean to say is it is God’s will or some other religious justification. That is fine but clearly just an opinion that should have no power over anyone else’s choices, so not worth arguing over. Generally, these arguments are made by people who just want you to reinforce their own beliefs so they can feel they are right.

For the non-religious, I think what they really mean, but don’t want to say explicitly, is simply that evolution drives us to procreate and so that must be a part of our purpose. If you go down this path, the only logical conclusion is that procreation is actually our ONLY individual purpose. We are all just genomic experiments in some grand, mindless process, here to mutate and pass on variants to our offspring. Rather depressing.

Fortunately, we long ago told nature and evolution to get stuffed and decided to chart our own path. We abide by neither evolutions nor natures dictates. We don’t let bacteria kill us without a fight, we don’t let babies born with defects die in the woods, and we decide if and when we’ll have children. Even for those who want them but are unable to, we have, and continue to, develop workarounds. Our history is one of us wresting control of our destiny away from nature and evolution (or God, if you like) and we now get to decide our own individual purpose.

As for the demographic and economic arguments, those are easily dismissed. Controlling peoples reproduction, like controlling people in general, always fails in the end and often spectacularly. If you wake up one day and think “I should control or manipulate the choices of individuals because it will be best for the collective” then you should probably smack yourself very hard, as that is the first step down the path to hell (also known as fascism, communism, and theocracy). If you still think that way afterwards, then you are probably destined to go into politics (but please, for the good of the collective, don’t).