Should I have children even though I don't want them?
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Is there anything more pointless than when social media tries to litigate the decision of whether to have kids or not?
Here is – allowing for the availability of contraception – one of the most personal decisions a human being can ever make, and let’s turn to Twitter’s own @tradwifeMiami92 for their thoughts. And, while I don’t really see much explicit anti-natalist positioning on such platforms, I have no doubt that it’s out there; people presenting this highly personal question as having one universal answer.
I have previously argued that the amount of big choices we make in life is relatively limited; whether to reproduce, though, certainly belongs amongst them. It perhaps wasn’t ever meant to be a choice, rather an inevitable consequence of the established joys of fooling around; after all, it seems our species was breeding long before it seemed to have obtained full ‘reproductive consciousness’, i.e. realized precisely what a fumble could lead to.
Nonetheless, I’d argue that it makes no sense to present having the option as a sign of decadence rather than liberation. It’s good that we think about the ethics of bringing people into the world and how many, even if that does make things a little more existentially challenging for humans who have to make the decision.
And indeed your choice is always only whether to light the existential touchpaper or not – it’s utterly pointless to spend time debating whether you should have the kids you already have. In that context the sensible response is to provide your charges with unstinting love and support. Not that this seems to stop some, who embark on internal debates as to whether they should have kids after those kids are born; this can surely only stem from having wanted or even expected raising children to be something other and perhaps easier than it turns out.
Younger men and women, in my experience, are particularly prone to this, keeping an idealized image of themselves as a family surrounded by perfect elegant children, the woman beautiful in a summer dress while a handsome and well-renumerated husband plucks another Scotch egg from the picnic basket. Admittedly, the scotch egg may be my touch, but the rule stands; all naivety has to be paid for in the end, in this case in swathes of piss, shit and sleep deprivation.
What we can all surely agree about this exceptionally sensitive subject is that the choice is a highly personal one. There is no one-size-fits-all answer, and indeed, the same individual will feel very differently about the matter at different stages of their lives; many a relationship which foundered on the question in early youth would have led to children in later life.
Every permutation exists. There are people with kids who want them; people who don’t who do; people who don’t who don’t and, with this the most damaging category, people who want kids who absolutely shouldn’t have them. It’s important to keep a space open for people who, for whatever reason, don’t want to have children, and trying to force people who don’t want children or additional children into breeding has proved historically to be both morally dubious and full of unintended consequences; the crowding of Romanian orphanages with 170,000 children families were unable to cope with raising is a salutary lesson here.
Personally, at the age of 40 I remain a childless man – as far as I know. And that ‘far as I know’ isn’t just a joke. In my mid-20s, I worked as a sperm donor; in those days you could buy such existential agonies off me for €40 a pop. I signed a contract stating that they had a right to contact me aged 18, meaning I might just get an interesting knock on the door in around 2026.