Is Not Having Kids Selfish, or Is Having Them Selfish?

Recently Pope Francis answered the question for us:

“A society with a greedy generation, that doesn’t want to surround itself with children, that considers them above all worrisome, a weight, a risk, is a depressed society,” the pope said. “The choice to not have children is selfish. Life rejuvenates and acquires energy when it multiplies: It is enriched, not impoverished.”

This seems rather hypocritical: current Catholic dogma requires all priests, monks and nuns in the Catholic Church to be celibate. The Orthodox and Anglican Churches, which are similar to the Catholic Church in many ways, have no prohibition against married priests, and most Protestant sects allow their pastors to marry. Most Islamic and Jewish sects also allow married clerics.

By the pope's own definition, then, choosing to become a Catholic priest or nun is an inherently selfish act. If he was truly selfless, he would have married and joined the Episcopalian Church instead. Then he could have joined the Catholic Church when Pope John Paul II decreed it possible. In fact, there are hundreds of married Anglican priests who quit that Church and became Catholics.

But is the basic premise even true? Let's turn the question around. Is it selfish to have kids? Is it selfish to have five kids rather than one or two? Why do people want kids in the first place?

Historically, there are lots of reasons: people had kids because they wanted to have sex and couldn't avoid getting pregnant. They wanted to create workers to till their soil and milk their goats. They wanted to have lots of kids because child mortality was extremely high and the more workers they produced the wealthier they would be. They needed someone to care for them when they were old.

These days the reasons are a little more abstract. Some of the old reasons still exist: they want someone in the family to carry on the family business. They don't want to be all alone when they're old. They want someone to carry on the family name. They're pressured into having kids by their parents, who expect it. Some have kids out of duty to their religion. Some people just love children, and like taking care of them, in the same way that some people like having pets to care for.

The real reason people have kids is because they have sex.

But, still, the real reason people have kids is because they have sex. Cynically, the Catholic Church forbids birth control: if you want to have sex, you have to have kids. But only a paltry percentage of American and European Catholics are still suckered by that nonsense.

Unfortunately, there are more sinister reasons for having kids. Some people have as many as possible in the hopes that they can out-reproduce others, so that "their kind" (typically, their race or religion) will have more numerical power and influence. This is the underlying reason that some religions encourage large families. Religion is most effectively transmitted by indoctrination from childhood: you never get a chance to question any of the underlying assumptions of a religion if you're brainwashed from birth. Mormonism was founded on this concept -- your ascent into godhood depends on maximizing the number of descendants, and it's why they practiced polygamy at the beginning.

These days a lot of white Americans want more whites to have kids because they're afraid they'll be outnumbered by Latinos and other non-Europeans in a couple of decades. These same fears were expressed in the 19th century when the Irish, Swedes, Germans, Poles, Czechs, Hungarians and other "lesser" immigrants threatened to outnumber "real" Americans of English extraction.

Kids are the only practical form of immortality

But perhaps the biggest reason that people have kids, when you boil it all down, is that they are the only practical form of immortality. If they have kids some part of them will live on. That's why parents put such pressure on their children to give them grandchildren: they went through all that work to have kids to grant themselves a bit of immortality, and without grandchildren they will "die off."

All those reasons are selfish: they accrue some personal benefit, or satisfy a selfish demand another person made upon them, or provide an advantage to their in-group. Having kids because your pope demands it is not a selfless act, because the pope's rationale is not selfless: his personal goal is to propagate Catholicism. We wouldn't perceive Iranians obeying the ayatollah's command that they have more children in order to outnumber the infidels as selfless, would we?

The only selfless reason for having children is that the future survival of humanity depends on them. With seven billion people in the world, this is not a really big concern at the moment.

Now, what are the reasons people don't have kids? The selfish answer is that they don't want to be bothered with the responsibility.

But are you selfish if you know that you lack patience and think you would be bad a parent? What if you knew that you couldn't love a child that was mentally retarded, and didn't to want risk having to face that kind of agony?

What if your parents always argued, were bitterly unhappy, got divorced and have bickered endlessly and made your life miserable ever since? Would you be selfish if you recognized those same traits in yourself and wanted to avoid inflicting such tragedy on your own child?

Are you selfish for not having kids if you've socked away so much money (which was possible because you didn't have kids) that you won't have to depend on someone else to care for you when you're old?

Every child takes some social resources: they take up spots in daycare, seats in classrooms, money in education aid. People without kids pay property and income taxes to support schools, even though they don't personally use those facilities. Conservatives are always bitching about high property and income taxes, but the largest expenditure of state and local governments is educating kids.

People with kids pay less in taxes and are a greater burden on society, though it's a price we should all be willing to pay.

People with kids pay less in taxes and are a greater burden on society. We should be glad to help them, because there's no question that the world needs kids. But how many kids do we need?

Because there are limits. There are more than seven billion people in the world. The planet is finite. There are only so many acres of farmland in the world, and there's a limit to how much food each acre produces. In 2100 it is projected that there will be 11 billion people in the world. By that time we will have used up all the oil and gone through a good chunk of the coal. The world will be much warmer, there will be more droughts in some areas, sea level will be much higher, forcing people in coastal areas inland. Our highly productive petroleum-based agriculture will be a distant memory.

People fool themselves into thinking that we'll always be able to figure out some way of feeding more people with fewer resources. But history shows this is false. Drought and famine have destroyed civilizations time and again. The Romans had the best technology in the world: they built aqueducts to bring water from afar and they built ships and roads to import food from other continents. At the height of the Roman Empire they were convinced it was eternal. But nothing is.

If we don't carefully plan ahead our empire will come crashing down as well.

The carrying capacity of the planet might be 1 billion people, it might be 2 billion, it might be 10 billion. It will depend on the level of technology and the sustainability of our agricultural practices. But we know that the number, whatever it is, is finite. It's not a trillion. It's not 100 billion. At some point humanity's population on earth has to reach a steady state, where births equal deaths.

If that number happens to be, say 5 billion, and we've got 11 billion when all the aquifers and coal and oil run out and we have to depend on wind and solar generation for all our power, what happens to 6 billion extra people?

Is it right to keep barreling ahead, madly procreating without regard to the limits that humanity has crashed into countless times before, on the vain hope that "we'll figure something out" when disaster strikes again?

Is it selfish to not have kids of your own so that the kids and grandkids of people who want them will have better lives? Is it right to criticize people who are giving up their effective immortality so that you can have yours?