I know I spend a lot of time saying things like this, but I’m kinda creeped out by the notion of “reproductive rights.” Why should anyone have an unrestricted right to create other human beings?
This is why the “what if the government is run by the wrong people and makes bad criteria for licensing” counterargument to parental licensing doesn’t bother me that much - it’s not a rights-violation because there’s no right to have children in the first place. At worst, some people who should’ve been able to have children wouldn’t, but that’s minor compared to the benefit of some of the wrong people not being able to have children.
Am I the only one on Tumblr who intuitively understands Beauty of Parenthood/parental rights stuff?
(*mumbles something about cupcakes*)
Idk I feel like parenthood is really intrinsic to my conception of the good. Like people complain about a lot of different rights violations, but rarely does anyone actually leave the country because of stop-and-frisk or the NSA or high taxes. If I couldn’t legally have kids I would leave the country in a second and I’m sure a lot of other people would too.
(I know the OP was about moral not legal rights I’m just saying that parenthood is really important to lots of people)
I don’t think abusive parents should be allowed to have children, but for anything less I’m skeptical that the benefits of fewer children with somewhat unhappy childhoods or a gene pool that’s better in some way outweigh the unhappiness of people who want to have children and can’t.
Genuine question: are you serious? Not, “in two years, before which I am certainly not having kids.” In a second? You don’t want to get pregnant right now. How is a right you will do your best to avoid exercising valuable?
Particularly if the restriction was “you have to ask twice, at least six months but less than a year apart, without missing either appointment”? Because that seems like a very reasonable procedure to me, and one I’m confident you could pass.
Uh no, I was being hyperbolic. What I meant was more like “It would take me a second to decide to leave the country, and my actual emigration would be sometime over the next several years after I finished school, depending on things like my job situation, the plans of family and friends, taxes and cost of living in different countries, etc.”
Obviously I could pass that. It still squicks me out, though, I think because it falls under “making it harder to have wanted children” which is my least favorite category of influencing people’s reproductive choices. (My favorites are, unsurprisingly, “making it harder to have unwanted children” and “making it easier to have wanted children”–think starting more abortion clinics or giving tax credits allowing groups of people to afford to have more children.) Like I’m a utilitarian, I’m not going to say that no form of pregnancy licensing is ever justified, but it seems weird to even be thinking about it when like 40% of births in the US are unplanned right now. Preventing one of those pregnancies is a win-win-win situation! So much low-hanging fruit that doesn’t require interpersonal utility comparisons!
And said test seems trivial to me, but I’m wary of assuming things that seem easy to me are easy for others. There might be people for whom making appointments is hard who could still be good parents. (Actually now that I think about it I’ve slept through multiple dentist appointments.)
(Irrelevant note: I was wondering whether my strong intuitive feelings about this are a product of Tumblr–it would make sense, since prolonged exposure to Tumblr’s ~neoteny culture~ has definitely made me more aggressively pro-adulthood and maturity which to me includes parenthood. But then I remembered one time in my high school bio class when the teacher asked, “Should the US institute a one-child policy to combat overpopulation?” Most people were like “yeah that sounds like a good idea” while I was like “… what the actual fuck.” Hearing high school students debate a political issue when they haven’t already determined which side is Blue and which is Red is interesting. I was reduced to pleading, “But what about reproductive rights?! I thought you guys were like super into those!”)