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I’ve been pondering a question lately… do liberals have a right to have children?
I don’t mean this in the childish, cliché way. That is, I’m not saying that most liberals are such awful people that they should not be perpetuating their genes or their lifestyles. Of course in other posts on this blog, I and my fellow contributors have scorned liberals for not having more kids, so you may think you’ve caught me in a contradiction, but I don’t think that’s the case. The point I want to make is this: liberals may have no right to bear children, because they’re doing it for the wrong sorts of reasons.
I suppose what got me thinking of this was the irritation that I often feel hearing about liberal parents raising their One Perfect Child. Having lived in more than one town filled with educated liberals, I have a multitude of slightly distasteful associations with a particular sort of liberal upbringing: the arbitrary-seeming dietary rules, the special daycares, the politically correct coloring books and television programs. Parents who give their little boys dolls and enroll their little girls in martial arts classes. Just in general, I have a sort of aversion to the idea of the excessively-programmed childhood.
Still, at the same time, I’m admittedly a lot more sympathetic to the same sort of engineering from the other end. Without broaching the difficult topic of homeschooling, I can certainly at least agree that parents are right to read their children Bible stories, to expect them to observe (at appropriate ages) the Church’s feasts and fasts, to observe and regulate the books, music and television through which their children are entertained. All parents will properly make decisions about how their children should be educated and about the environments that are appropriate for them; I may disagree with the decisions that liberals make, but there’s no reason to be irked about the fact that they’re making them. Why, then, do I have this residual feeling that there’s something disturbingly unserious about the liberal approach to parenthood?
I think it really boils down to this: for many people, having kids is something that a person chooses to do, as a part of his own quest for self-fulfillment. The liberal emphasis on autonomy naturally leads one to this sort of view: some people choose to devote their lives to having families, some to furthering careers, some to becoming champion ping-pong players, and all of these are perfectly legitimate so long as the person in question is pleased and happy and not hurting anyone. Obviously as a Catholic, I find this way of looking at things deeply flawed on lots of levels, but with regards to having children it seems particularly depraved. In bringing a person into existence, you are making a very radical choice on behalf of another human being. Far more than just affecting another’s autonomy, you are actually in an important sense causing it to exist. (And indeed, many liberals would probably be happy to say that the parents are the only rational agents responsible for bringing the child into being.)
If, as most liberals seem to believe, becoming a parent is something you decide to do (rather than something that just happens in the natural course of events, or something that you agree to do out of obedience), what could be a sufficient reason for making that decision on behalf of someone else? There’s something very disturbing about the idea that I could justify the existence of another life merely on the basis of my desire for the experience of motherhood.
A lot will depend, of course, on the attitude one takes towards life in general. If you suppose that most people are better off existing than not, you’ll probably be less worried about that fact that some people decide to have children, say, just because they think kids are cute. In most cases, they won’t be harming anyone, even if their attitude is reprehensibly frivolous. On the other hand, if you’re inclined towards a more pessimistic view of life generally, you might think it rather barbaric that one person should consign another to endure it, just so that the offspring’s early years can be spent as a kind of glorified pet for their parents.
Anyway, I find this line thought-provoking. If parenthood is undertaken as a kind of hobby, is the parent then responsible in some way for the suffering that their offspring will endure in the course of life? The Catholic, without denying the obligation to provide the best upbringing possible for his young, can lessen the emotional burden by viewing the bearing and rearing of children as simultaneously a duty and an honor, and as a task undertaken for holy reasons. If he became a parent out of obedience to God, and did his best to discharge his obligations as a parent, he can reasonably expect God to make it all work out for the best. The truth is, of course, that any child, no matter how carefully his upbringing is planned, may go astray in one way or another, and some parental decisions will turn out for the worse. Seeing one’s child turn to sorrow or sin must under any circumstances be deeply painful, but the liberal, unlike the Catholic, must bear the full weight of the responsibility himself.
Well, in this spirit, I thought I’d include this poem by Wendell Berry. It is titled, To My Children, Fearing for Them
Terrors are to come. The earth
is poisoned with narrow lives.
I think of you. What you will
live through, or perish by, eats
at my heart. What have I done? I
need better answers than there are
to the pain of coming to see
what was done in blindness,
loving what I canot save. Nor,
your eyes turning towards me,
can I wish your lives unmade
though the pain of them is on me.
St. Louis-Marie de Montfort,
Pope St. Pius X,
St. Joseph,
St. Ambrose of Milan,
St. Thomas Aquinas,
St. Francis (and St. Clare),
St. Catherine of Siena,
St. Alphonsus Ligouri,
St. John Chrysostom,
I think it’s safe to state that liberals do have a “right” to have children if those liberals are married. They do not have a “right” to raise their children in a sinful manner per se but they have a “fundamental right” to raise them as they see fit. This reminds me of the “religious liberty” topic — perhaps it is similar?
I think a good way to look at things like this is to acknowledge error in raising children on the basis of the moral law but also recognize and trust that God will be able to save and reach out to such children regardless of their upbringing.
“If, as most liberals seem to believe, becoming a parent is something you decide to do (rather than something that just happens in the natural course of events, or something that you agree to do out of obedience), what could be a sufficient reason for making that decision on behalf of someone else? There’s something very disturbing about the idea that I could justify the existence of another life merely on the basis of my desire for the experience of motherhood.”
I absolutely agree. This is something my wife and I have come to realize. We have a five-month-old and whenever we take him around our atheistic, contracepting blue-state friends the topic of having children inevitably comes up. Mind you, we never initiate this conversation, but our friends keep saying things like “We want to have children eventually but we just don’t have the money” (this coming from people who make twice as much as us, and in one case five times as much as us), “We’re just not ready yet”, etc. Really, like Clara said, what reason COULD you give for bringing a child into the world. When it comes to contributing to the origin of a new life there is no reason that we can give as individuals that can justify this. It is nonsense to even attempt it which is why the results are so feeble and egotistical: “it would be pleasing TO ME if we had a child”, “I want to have the experience of having a child”. Ugh.
Do you see what widespread contraception leads to? It causes us to ask certain questions that should not even be asked. These questions simply should not arise. The question is not, “should I have children?” or “why should I have children?”. Those questions were answered as soon as you got married. That’s (principally) what marriage is FOR! The question is “are there any grave reasons why we should refrain from having children at this time?”. This question can be answered in a way that does not usurp God’s role and make us lord and master of life.
A good post, Clara. Some article was published recently on these micro-managing parents who make sure their kids are in soccer, hockey, oboe, etc., etc. It is as though the parents are living vicariously through their kids. The study behind the article claimed that kids were healthier when their parents let them be kids. That actually means paying *less* attention to them in some respects. Rather than cramming their days full of regimented appointments, give them a few hours every day to find toads and caterpillars in the backyard.
CLARA’S NOTE: This is a re-post of something submitted earlier by an anonymous source. It has been slightly edited from from its original version in order to remove content that I deemed blasphemous. If the author would prefer to see it removed entirely from the board he (or she) may express that preference and I will remove the comment.
“Seeing one’s child turn to sorrow or sin must under any circumstances be deeply painful, but the liberal, unlike the Catholic, must bear the full weight of the responsibility himself.”
How untrue. The assumption that anyone else is ‘responsible’ for someone’s turning towards sorrow or sin is deeply flawed. People make *choices*. An adult child will make a CHOICE.
And how can you blame anyone for turning towards sorrow? If your child chooses to marry someone they love, and that person has terminal cancer, they are choosing sorrow - but their commitment to their beloved and their willingness to bear that cross is commendable.
As for their choosing sin/alienation from God, that’s about their relationship with God, and it’s THEIR choice. No one else’s.
If you ARE going to blame the parents, then be even-handed. There are plenty of Catholic children out there who go off the rails because their parents are breathing down their necks, stifling their childhood and shoving faith down their throats in a joyless, mechanistic manner - and either the children become incapable of making adult decisions or the angriest adolescents around, who won’t touch organised religion with a bargepole.
Yes, parents like that exist across the board, but this post needed balance, hence that example.
And how do you separate “I want to experience motherhood” from your “Every woman is called to be a mother”? Isn’t that desire part of the indication of the vocation to motherhood?
And frankly, I’d rather have a mother who wanted to experience motherhood than one who resented me as her 5th child and her ‘duty’ to the man she married not because she loved him, but because ‘well, he’s a good Catholic boy, and that’s what you do as a Catholic’. *shudder* Talk about the perversion of natural law and the sacrament of marriage.
At least the former would be putting her heart into it, even if you don’t agree with her methods.
3/12/2007 05:28:00 AM
Well, Clara, will you be responding?
Yes, sorry, I was in the middle of a response but then the doctor was hungry for his dinner, so like a good, obedient soon-to-be-wife I dropped what I was doing immediately and went to cook for him. :)
I’ll finish that response up now.
All right, Anon (and if you post again, please, pick a name to post under, just to make it clear which posts are coming from the same person) let me start by saying that I’m not entirely lacking in sympathy with your sentiments. I, too, am somewhat repulsed by the upbringing that is micromanaged to the last detail and the parents who have a picture-perfect mental snapshot of how Junior has to turn out — and I agree that such parents can be found all across the political and religious spectrum. It’s good that there are a variety of personalities in the world, and parents ought to have some humility and flexibility. They are guardians, not gods, and part of the excitement of parenting should be seeing what kind of people one’s children grow into.
OK. But. There is still a very serious confusion in your post.
You seem to be laboring under the impression that building one’s life around the gratification of personal desires will make one’s actions honest, genuine and happy, while acting out of obedience to God or other properly instituted authorities will make one’s labors joyless and deadening. This is a very modernist idea: happiness comes from the unfettered exercise of autonomy. It isn’t so. As the lives of the saints show us over and over, obedience to God can bring more joy than anything else, both because it is rightly pleasurable for beings like us to honor the Almighty, and also because does in fact will for us the things that will make us happy.
Do you think the Mother of Christ spent her life grumbling, rendering services to her divine Son bitterly and resentfully, just because the whole arrangement wasn’t originally her idea? Or do you think she accepted the honor gladly and gratefully, rejoicing not in the pleasure of unfettered choice, but rather in the realization that she was an important part of God’s plan for mankind? And if she was able to rejoice in this realization, I see no reason why other mothers could not likewise be glad and grateful for the honor of being entrusted with the care of other souls. Privilege and duty are almost always bound together in the Christian life.
Understanding this, my meaning in the paragraph about children turning to sin and sorrow should become clear. I admit that I’m not writing here with the precision expected of me in my philosophical work. For example, I suggested that liberals have “no right” to have children, but in the strict philosophical sense I’m suspicious of rights-talk anyway. It’s just a provocative shorthand for what I wanted to say. Likewise, I don’t mean to suggest that parents (liberal or otherwise) are literally morally responsible for all of their offspring’s sins. Of course the children have free will and make their own choices, though the parents might still be partially responsible for misbehavior later in life, insofar as they were negligent in their duties to provide necessary moral formation for the child. But that’s not the point of my post. I was thinking about the emotional impact on a parent when a child makes bad choices.
My attention was arrested by this fact: the decision to become a parent affects others more than oneself, and particularly, affects the child more than the parent. Isn’t it fascinating that, for all the liberal obsession with maximizing autonomy, the very existence of one’s autonomy still depends entirely on the choices of others? A proper attitude towards parenthood should reflect an understanding of its ramifications. Just as it would be selfish and frivolous to want to be President of the United States just because it sounds like fun, so it would be culpably frivolous to become a parent merely because one wants to experience parenthood. In becoming a parent, one participates in the creation of a new soul, That soul will remain in existence for eternity, long after the baby fat has melted away and the cub scout meetings have ended. Kids are cute, but the immediate pleasure derived from their cuteness certainly is not enough to justify such a momentous action as bringing one into being.
To explain more carefully what I mean about guilt… suppose that my next door neighbor has a baby and lets me baby-sit sometimes. I think the child is cute, I have fun playing with it, and I get envious of my neighbor, both for having the child and also on account of the attention that she gets through her baby. So I decide to get pregnant and have one of my own. This kind of thing presumably happens quite often. Now fast-forward twenty years into the future, and suppose that my child gets himself into all kids of trouble (becomes a drug addict, gets arrested for some kind of crime, or what have you). I am likely to feel deeply guilty. I just wanted a cute little person to dress up in oshkosh b’gosh trousers. My motives were ephemeral and basically selfish. But of course, the ramifications of that choice went far beyond my short-term desire for a baby; insofar as they were more bad than good, and insofar as I attribute the child’s existence entirely to my whimsical action, it is neither strange nor entirely inappropriate for me to feel remorse for the frivolity of my actions.
When parenthood is undertaken both as an honor and as a duty, the thing can be put into perspective. Both parents and children are part of something larger than themselves. Thus, the parents can reasonably demand graces from God to help them discharge their duties faithfully, and when they have done their very best, they can turn trustingly to God and ask that He make it all work out for the best. Even when it seems not to, they don’t need to second-guess themselves as to whether they were wrong to bear children in the first place. Obedience to God is never an excessively frivolous reason for doing something.
Far from robbing things of their joy, God’s plans allow us to live life to its full, appreciating the deeper meaning in life. Without God and without obedience, we’re just a lot of broken human beings making a lot of stupid, selfish choices.