Childless people are often accused of selfishness. Our Italian colleague explores the nuances of motivation, sacrifice, duty and love embedded in our choices.
It is one of the most common retorts – especially in more traditional cultures – to someone who says that they don’t want children: that they are selfish. People who do not want to reproduce are selfish people. But why?
On the surface, it is easy enough to understand the reasoning: childfree people don’t want to lose precious sleep, to give up a significant chunk of their disposable income and most of their free time, to risk their body if they are women and their relationship if they have one, and to commit to a lifelong responsibility with unpredictable demands. In short, they are unwilling to make sacrifices for others.
Except, maybe they aren’t. The interesting part of the accusation of selfishness to childfree people is that it assumes people ought to be generous to someone who doesn’t even exist yet. They are supposed to be wanting to create a new human being in order to give up something precious for them. Instead of making sacrifices for the sake of those who are already here, they need to produce someone new to make sacrifices for. That is, unless we assume that having children is actually a duty to someone else: to society, to one’s one parents, to a partner or to humanity itself.
The partner argument is straightforward: some people desire children while at the same time they desire to be with a specific person who doesn’t. Something’s gotta give. So said partner makes the decision to have children in order to make their beloved happy – or not to lose them (which already comes across as a little self-interested). Calling such a decision generous or selfless seems to imply that some desires are justified and others are not. Why can’t the child-wanting partner make that sacrifice instead? How will the children feel once they find out, or sense, that one of their parents didn’t really want to have them? Sometimes it works out great – one of the advantages of partnership is that a person can make another do something they would not have chosen to do, but that they ultimately enjoy. But other times it doesn’t, and it ends up damaging the children too.
Sometimes it is parents who demand grandchildren, raising the question of whether this is a reasonable expectation. What is the gift of life, after all, if not a gift of freedom? We are created, each one of us, out of nowhere, to do with our own existence whatever we want. Or so we assume, today – in most human societies people would be born with inescapable obligations. In ours, we think we are not, that the best of parents will support their children no matter what they choose to do with themselves. But if the gift of our life comes with demands to reproduce, or to care for the elderly – is it really a gift? Or is it rather, once again, an obligation we didn’t ask for and cannot escape? Some parents will try to convince their offspring to have children by claiming that life is not meaningful without them, thus stating a paradox: life is the greatest gift one can give, but said life is meaningless unless one reproduces in turn… so the gift of life is precious only under the condition that it continues to be given in the same form.
There is then a supposed obligation to society, which is similar, but more expansive, than that owed to one’s parents. We need to have children because they will pay our pensions. Because they will support us in old age. Because a greying, aging society is sad and not innovative and the economy doesn’t grow and the schools will be empty and the people who don’t look like us will take over. We’ve all heard versions of these arguments: people who do not have children are not fulfilling their duty to society, whether that society is defined as extended family, the nation, or humanity. But isn’t it selfish, rather, to want more people to be created so that we can retire earlier, live much longer than our “natural” lifespans, or keep economic activity growing irrespective of all the damage that it is inflicting on the non-human world, and, at this point, on humanity itself?
Once we scratch the surface of unchallenged norms and widespread assumptions – and it’s a thick crust – we see that the decision to have children can be just as “selfish” as the decision not to have them. It’s just a matter of different kinds of selfishness.
Of course, people who choose not to have children might be the kind who just want to enjoy themselves in life and never do anything generous for anyone else. The après moi, le déluge kind. However, in our contemporary societies, especially where contraception and abortion are accessible, most people have children because they think that having them will be a positive experience and add meaning and love to their lives. Personal fulfillment is the main motivation, along with the continuation of part of oneself – genes, teachings – into the future. Unless one is a supporter of the project of voluntary human extinction, one could argue that there isn’t anything wrong with such desires. After all, childfree people too are here, alive and able to enjoy life, because someone desired to bring them into the world. In this sense, then, it’s not a matter of whether but of how much. In a world overpopulated by humans, it would indeed be wrong to reproduce beyond replacement. Some would argue, given the gravity of the situation, that even two children are too many, that we should make a collective agreement to have no more than one on average until humanity is back down to a sustainable size.
For the people who desire children the best moral decision, the least selfish one, would be to either opt not to reproduce or limit the number of children one has to one or two. This would be good for the biosphere, for the species at risk of extinction, for the health of the planet, and ultimately for humanity itself, because reducing our numbers means a better chance at life on a healthy, thriving Earth and at the experience of wonder, beauty and beyond-human relations.
Looking at it this way, the people who do desire children and yet decide not to have them for the sake of the planet are the least selfish of all. It is easy to give up something one didn’t want in the first place, but to give up something like being a parent just for the sake of others, is something else.
This discussion, by the way, rests on the assumption that being selfish is bad, or rather, that having self-interest as the only guiding principle, always placed before one’s duty to others, is bad. Humans are social animals; we evolved and are forced by our biology to put our collective interest, at least some of the time, above our individual one. That our modern, Western, individualistic societies have temporarily obfuscated this fact doesn’t make it less true. The most successful of these societies are based on social contracts that are more impersonal but no less strong and that require every individual to support the group in some way.
Humans are limited. Everything we choose to sacrifice ourselves for inevitably comes to the detriment of something else. It does happen that some children of very successful or very altruistic parents come to resent them – even as they admire them – because of a perceived lack of attention, or for having had to grow up in a chaotic household. Many people struggle to balance even just a full-time job and childcare responsibilities; our society also demands vast resources of time and money to be dedicated to consumption, entertainment and travel, so, from the point of view of society, people who have children often disappear from everywhere except their homes and workplaces (and chosen holiday destinations). Does this weaken a society’s cohesion, inclusiveness and mutual support? There is a specific kind of loneliness, not usually discussed, experienced by people who have no children while their peers have started a family. Seen from their perspective, the decision of having children, while unassailable, can often mean, for other adults, less friends to talk to during a difficult time, less help for one’s social or environmental causes, less company, and, ultimately, less of that most precious thing – the attention and love of other people. How narcissistic! one might think. How entitled! To assume that people should pay attention to you and your cause more than to their own kids!
But no one assumes that – now. There certainly have been societies or historical moments when one had to forsake oneself and one’s family when a bigger cause called. The letters of the Italian partigiani, for example, are full of expressions of love for their parents, siblings, wives, children, accompanied by the clearly stated sentiment that the duty to defeat the Nazis took precedence. And that, at the same time, their sacrifice was not made only out of an abstract sense of country and for the world to be rid of that scourge, but also for their immediate kin and for them to be able to live freely and safely in the future.
There is a conflict, here, between two kind of duties – firstly to oneself and one’s children, which would motivate one to get on a boat and leave a war-torn country immediately, and secondly to one’s community, country and principles, which means one has to stay and fight. Usually, countries are freed by people acting on this latter kind of duty. In our individualistic, comfortable societies, we tend to forget this basic fact of human history, which is why we tend to sympathise more with refugees than with freedom fighters. And yet – being a freedom fighter is a lot more generous.
Some people with children will make the argument that one can only truly care about the future when one has children, that is, when one’s beloved (or their genes) have a stake in it. As long as someone is doing something good, it could be argued that it does not matter why they do it, and that wanting a better future for their children is still much more admirable that just living it up without caring about the mess they are leaving behind. But the aforementioned line of reasoning illuminates one of the paradoxes of parents’ selflessness – that, while the sacrifice can be supreme, there is often a personal gain of some sort to be expected, even when it’s indirect. The people with no children that do something for the sake of others or of the planet, sometimes at significant personal cost – activism, donations, politics, research, public admonition – do so out of a concern for life itself, even when they do not imagine any part of themselves directly enjoying the hopefully better future.
Love is a strange kind of currency, and how it is created, divided and multiplied is subjective and ultimately mysterious. But it is true that any one person’s time, attention and loyalty aren’t infinite. Some people choose not to have children for the sake of something they love and thus want to dedicate themselves to – be it a cause, a job, a religion, another person, their homeland or community, or the Earth itself.
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