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.
Kamala Harris father was a Marxist and Kanye’s dad was an ex black panther. My biggest fear is having a kid and him going Kylo Ren on me politically.
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Message got,I will force my kids to be liberatarian capitalists so they become communists out of rebellion
Playing that 4D chess. 😏
I don’t have kids but when i do would love to take a good approach because i would hate to lose them to the conditioning of this country
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Haha that would be terrible. I didn’t know that about Kamala’s dad
yeah :( really sucks how our neoliberal society can cause that
It’s like that strange curse of right-wing politicians being named after Lenin
Kanye still gonna make a switch any day now…any day now 🥺
Adoption has many problems and shouldn’t be thought as a perfect replacement for a biological child. Adoption is for the child/teenager to have a family after every attempt to keep them with their biological one have failed, not for an adult to just get a new baby.
As an institution, adoption always has a tragedy in a child’s or teen’s lives behind it… I guess unless we’re talking about adopting your step-children. Either their biological family is dead, they are a threat to their lives or decided they can’t be their parents.
Climate refugees deserve to stay with their families, they already suffered the loss of their land. Adopting them isn’t justice.
It’s not amoral, however, to desire a biological child and have one with a consenting partner (or a donor). If you can provide a good life for them, that’s more than fine. We are human and wanting to form a family is natural, our families take many shapes.
It’s also perfectly okay to look at your options, lets say no chance of getting pregnant and inability to properly parent an adopted child or teen through their struggles, and decide you can’t be a parent.
Very good points.
I have many opinions on this topic.
good ones comrade, very good ones
Adoption is difficult and you’re guaranteed a kid already with ptsd but I was adopted so pls adopt, foster families suck so so bad
Has there ever been a time when would it have been morally permissible to have children? Prior to modern obstetrics a huge portion of children died in childbirth for a whole host of awful reasons. At least having a kid doesn’t imply it’s probable immediate painful death anymore.
My thoughts exactly, I think most people throughout human history were birthing kids into rough circumstances, whether they knew it or not.
As long as it’s not about Malthusianism, there’s no problem with some people not having children
Malthusianism is just ecofascism, isn’t it?
A dangerous unscientific idea that leads to genocide
I always conceived of Malthusianism as yes, that, but specifically for ultra-rich types of people, not normally plebs on the ground like us. The types of people who actually have sway over national/international policy.
I’m pretty much in the same thought boat as you, personally. I’ve contemplated getting snip pretty seriously since I was even younger, and I’m not anywhere near being too old to have kids.
A comrade made a point I thought was valid: fascists are having kids, so should we - so that the next generation will be even more radical than us as we teach them radicalism from a young age (although Pete Buttigieg might disagree with that assessment lol). If I were to ever want a child, I would adopt. Same opportunity to raise young Marxists, and it gets an already existing child out of the system.
There may also be some internalized eugenics-y reasons for me personally, not wanting to pass on my many disabilities through blood. That might be fucked up and I would adopt a disabled child in a heartbeat, but the idea just rubs me the wrong way, like I said personally.
edit: I also want to add that I don’t view anyone other than myself with this mindset. It is others’ prerogative whether or not they have children despite their disabilities, and I support them in that. I also think that there is an unfair malignment of people who do not want to pass their genes down, for disability-related reasons, however.
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Joke’s on them. Im a race traitor.
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Yeah, it’s always a little unfortunate seeing the 20-30 year old Jessicas and Marks getting their big truck and pumping out 6-8 little Tuckers and Lakynns in the suburbs.
Probably the absolute worst, piece of shit, murder-worthy person I know is having twins, they’ll be his 7th and 8th 😒 me and a related friend have joked about chemical castration more than once. I genuinely think fascists have a particularly strong narcissistic slant with their kids, obsessed with the whole “this is my mini me who will shower me with love unconditionally forever and live life how I always wanted.”
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I really genuinely think they just have kids for all the wrong reasons, mostly that narcissistic stereotype. Sometimes for little free laborers, sometimes to save a failing romantic relationship. Sometimes pressure from equally shitty parents. We all know the types.
Man oh man I’ve seen a lot of my peers have kids but some of them don’t even have the sense to lie about why, some of them just straight up cite sugar-coated versions of these reasons…
There is no problem having or not having children. They are different life paths that are full of regrets and complications, as well as full of joys and opportunities.
Lenin didn’t have children and he regretted it, and many have them and they regret it.
It’s a personal choice, not a moral one. If we raise children to be resilient and compassionate, there is no need to fear the future.
Simply, don’t base your decision on a phantom such as fear. It cannot be a prescribed decision.
Would you disparage a friend if they chose to have kids?
Absolutely not, I think that is their choice to make. I am just posing the question, y’know? Looking for perspectives
No but I would be confused. Many of my friends with kids tell me to not have kids and finish school so I would at least not feel unjustified in questioning someone having kids even if it seems taboo. It feels weird to treat it as some kind of personal decision because it involves so much more than just the parents. If the child and their environment are not taken into account immediately, then I assume they will treat their child like property.
Given the climate Apocalypse I personally don’t think it’s a good idea to have kids. But with that said I’m not about to tell anyone else not to have them. With the exception of Musk, he can fuck off.
Ngl I’m pretty excited to see how his kids turn out, you know the poor bastard named Æon69xxxz or whatever the fuck is going to have some wild ass weird rich people shit later in life 😂
It’s a no for me. And usually I am confused by how haphazardly people make their decision.
h o r m o n e s
Adopting is best I think. Get those babies out of the system and as far away from human trafficking as possible.
This is a very narrow and simplistic view of adoption
It is. Can you believe that guy? What the hell?
that guy committed the internet sin of oversimplification, how will communism recover smh
I think if you deny life to a potential child to prevent them from living and dying in a fucked-up world, then you’re also denying that potential child the opportunity to fight for a better one.
Yes, and every communist able to do so should have kids because you have the opportunity to educate your children so that they question the world around them. We should reproduce our ideas through all means, because our fight is for the future of humanity, so having/adopting children is not only ethical, but in my view a duty as a communist
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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.
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having kids just for the communism I feel is a bit of a meh Idea
First you imply that children would be raised just for that, but I mentioned that in the context of the struggle for a better world, of course we shouldn’t raise children based on our own projections, and should always treat our children first and foremost as human beings.
Second, you imply in “just for the communism” that the struggle for a world without exploitation is a small and irrelevant thing. Again, this is a struggle for the future of humanity, if you will have children, why not arm them with the tools to accomplish that? The struggle against exploitation is an inter-generational one, the tasks we are doing now will be the basis for future struggle
I see the merit in someone trying to impart their knowledge to children, unfortunately children sometimes rebel just to be opposite their parents. I will also say that just being a major time sink alone brings to question if a comrade’s time would be put to better revolutionary use in other avenues, definitely a case by case basis IMO
