Is it ethical to have children if you believe their lives will suck?

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Style Pass

2024-04-25 17:00:08

I’m currently 30 years old. A lot of things start happening around this age range: Sex and the city starts being funny, you start to know what mortgages and Minoxidil are, and your friends start having kids — on purpose(!!!).

And just like having kids, talking about the decision of having kids also becomes a common thing. Don’t get me wrong, the demographic implosion is just as real among my friend group as anywhere else. Most of them don’t plan on having kids. But now they really thought about it and mostly concluded they don’t want kids, whereas previously they simply didn’t even think about it.

A lot of very compelling reasons are usually presented when justifying this decision, lack of money being the first one, followed by not having a proper house or just not feeling ready, but another frequent and more disturbing reason also shows up somewhat frequently: They don’t want to have kids because they believe the future is going to suck.

And I get them, most things that make my 30 year old life harder today only seem to be getting worse, at ever accelerating rates — housing crisis, global warming, and other well-known consequences of late capitalism — all of these seem to be here to stay and will probably be much worse by the time these children become adults.