PS: The point here is NOT that poor people shouldn't have kids, it's that no one should be having kids without having the basics of childcare covered, which necessitates widespread systemic, societal, and economic change so that no parent needs to worry about those basics, and kids can grow up in secure, healthy environments. I completely forgot to mention this when I originally posted it, and that's my bad.
Having children is biologically safest for parents and children at younger ages. Having children young isn’t the issue. Having a system that hoards wealth for a master class at the expense of society is. We need to abort the billionaire class - it shouldn’t exist. Resource hoarding creates poverty.
i think a good question to ask yourself is: would you like to be born in today's time? if not, then probably neither does your child.
Thinking about childrens' futures breaks my heart
Well the main reason you shouldn't have kids is because this world is going down to shit at an accelerating pace.
Between climate collapse, life extinction, resources exhaustion and AI dystopia, where do you see your kids in 20, 30, 40 years? Dead from starvation? Enslaved by oligarchs? Can you see a good life fort them in the horizon?
My kid is a teenager and I already feel like she's living the best of their life already. From their adult life, I can only see it go down.
your kids
From their adult life, I can only see it go down.
Gotta keep the whimsy going
This was a better point (in the US) before Roe v Wade got overturned honestly
PS: The point here is NOT that poor people shouldn't have kids,
You may not think that's the point, but that is the ultimate effect of your words.
I'd see it more like "Poor people shouldn't exist".
But as in "We need a society where nobody is considered poor and everybody is provided for"
No, this interpretation is too convenient for them.
Stop creating lives you're knowingly unprepared to provide for.
This is a personal indictment, not a systemic one. It specifically treats births as the problem, not wages.
I do not have children, nor do I plan to—I have way too many video games to play. However, I am not so stupidly suicidal as to suggest that it is morally superior of me to be a zoo panda—or to pretend that it is global warming stopping me from participating in the same desperate struggle for life that my great ancestors did when driving their feet through mud and soil to chase antelope.
No I understand it. Thinking further than yourself and thinking that government assistance and family will help you out. Diapers and formula are expensive. School, school supplies. The clothes they need as they grow, the food they're gonna need, the potential therapies that may be needed. Doctors appointments that sometimes insurance a doesn't cover. Then you might have a child born with an incurable disease that you might give your whole financial being trying to treat.
The amount of emotional availability that's needed, the patience and god forbid they die!!!! Plus it's a lifetime thing it never ends they don't turn 21 and leave you forever it's a forever thing. If you're still in contact with your parents, how many people are in their mid 30's who are still on good terms with their parents? Who do you still call or go to when all goes to shit?
Like fuck man!!!!
No I will not attempt to provide a life to something. Hell I can hardly afford myself. If I could provide financial reliability and if I wasn't in the living situation I'm in now, maybe but even still, I don't have that emotional expenditure and I know I'm not meant to raise a human and I'm okay with that.
I like being able to do whatever I want whenever I want, spending money on myself and I am a very detached person sometimes..... I wouldn't ever want to create an offspring only to know the life I would be able to provide isn't of sufficient quality.
"Poor people should go extinct"
One way or the other isn't that the goal? We should lift people out of poverty right? Why should poverty persist?
Mr. Strawman, is that you?
I mean considering the alternative is they don’t have access to food, housing, healthcare, and are essentially forced by circumstance to either become criminals or throw themselves into the meat grinder.
Now I don’t even like arguing this anymore since reproductive rights in my neck of the woods have gone away, but you can’t seriously think that giving a kid a miserable, painful life is better than not having a kid at all
I can, actually. Mostly because even growing up in poverty is rarely just a "miserable, painful life" even somewhere like Burkina Faso but also because collectively providing for the next generation is a thing that we should be constantly pushing for, culturally and publicly. Because without a future there is nothing to fight for, without youth there is nobody to care for the old, without fresh eyes there is no passion for change.
I can’t help it. I’m glad to be infertile. Children born right now would inevitably face the extreme results of a climate crisis, depleting fresh water stores, the global sociopolitical breakdown currently happening in favor of far right fascists funded by billionaires, and everything that comes with that.
I feel we are past the point of no return and am confident that I will probably die before the absolute worst of it, but my generation’s children would not. I have never been more afraid for children in my life, and there are many in my own little village. I just do not and cannot foresee a future where this gets better, with as powerless as we are against surveillance and military technology. As nihilistic as it sounds, we are speedrunning extinction and the guard rails are gone. I do not want to see children suffer for it, and especially not my own.
If you truly believed that everything can only get worse from here I don't know why you're still here, frankly.
Edit: I'll elaborate. You will die before the worst of it. We all will. I went to school for ecology, I know how grim things are. Worsening climate crises are going to push desperate people out of increasingly hot and arid regions into places with more fresh water and that will cause terrible conflicts. We're driving a mass extinction event that's making the leaderboards. (I don't think we're hitting K-T numbers without nuclear war but it's gonna be bad.)
But we also, as a species, bounced back from a 98% population loss that lasted a hundred thousand years. And that was Stone Age technology. I have the utmost faith in our adaptability and I'm pretty confident humanity will survive our own bullshit. Further, I don't think morality enters into it. Life is amoral. Existence is amoral. The ability to contemplate the nature of existence does not elevate us above that amorality. So I'm not throwing in the towel.
Unironically, yes. So should rich people. If we do that one first we can do the other one pretty easily.
So the most selfish thing that people can do... is only available to the impoverished?
The most selfish thing that the system can do is let children live in poverty.
Fuck this billionaire bootlicking bullshit.