I’m struggling with the thought of potentially bringing another person into this world in the future.

Things are so bad already and on track to get worse. Why, with this knowledge, should I have a child? Why should any of us?

I’m not asking this to be some overpopulation crazy eco-fascist but I just genuinely am wondering (and have an open mind) about what the actual implications are of bringing a child into the world right now.

By 2050 it’s pretty broadly agreed upon that things will be HORRIBLE climate wise and even worse if capitalism isn’t defeated soon. 2022 + 80 year potential life span is 2102. What will it be like then?

Why not adopt one of the billions of climate refugees instead?

I don’t know, maybe I’m way out of touch but I just can’t think of a reason to damn a child to a life like that.

  • Camarada ForteMA
    41·
    2 years ago

    Arguments reducing reproductive capacity to a “duty” are the same used by ethnosupremacists and religious fundamentalists. To capitalists, the reproduction of the labour force is the ultimate proletarian duty, and has been the basis of gendered reproductive exploitation since the beginning of capitalist accumulation.

    Yes, you’re right, I think it may be an overstatement to call it a duty, but having children, through any means, either birth or adoption, is how communities reproduce themselves historically. And yes, having children serves capital, so does buying commodities, yet it is how you reproduce your life. There’s no escape from this. But if we boycott ourselves from participating in raising children, the conservative white supremacist family will continue to do so anyways.

    The reduction of child-birth and reproductive labour (raising children) to a necessary unpaid labour that must be performed as “a duty” is a form of gendered violence that has created of half the population a marginalised class whose very body is the battleground on which they must war for autonomy

    It is only a form of gendered violence if it’s implied that it’s a task for a particular gender. I didn’t imply that at all. Since we’re both communists, you’d think it was an implicit agreement that we should fight against gender oppression? If I say that raising children is a communist duty (however wrong that statement might be), you can’t possibly expect that I was referring to women raising children in this day and age, seriously

    No human being’s reproductive capacities should be leveraged as a duty, in saying that you are implicitly stating that it is thus a shirking of that duty for someone to divorce themselves from relations to reproduction, which is not only misogynist but also queerphobic.

    The mistake was on me, I used “having children”, when I should have used “raising children”, as it would be more explicit that I am not speaking specifically of birth, I even mentioned adoption at the end of my comment.

    Putting aside even these marginalised classes, the positioning of reproduction as a duty serves only to reinforce the very family structures that serve the capitalist class: that is, a structure in which, regardless of personal feeling or aptitude, participating in reproduction is a moral demand and any desire to assert autonomy is a subversion of your ethical participation in society.

    So, in your view, we should not have, raise, adopt children because we would be “reinforcing the very family structures that serve the capitalist class”? No one is obliged to conform to those structures, and also, one can have a family beyond the capitalist nuclear family. This would be a “practical criticism” of the traditional nuclear family.