Pictures of Parenthood Very Different From Our Own
The natural right to liberty surely includes the right to bring children into this world, and to raise them as your own. If you do so, it’s your business, and (barring abuse or neglect) interference by others, or the state, is illegitimate; nor do you need a justification for your act. So it seems. But in The Family: A Liberal Defence David Archard asserts the contrary. Such permission as one has to found a family derives, not from more basic freedoms, or from one’s interest as a prospective parent, but from the interests of the prospective child and of the larger society: that is Archard’s view. This permission, therefore, is “granted only indirectly.” What difference does the source of the permission make? He provides a striking analogy:
Consider the case of the manager or coach of a sports team. In the performance of this role he has discretionary rights—chiefly who to select to play for the team and for the adoption of the tactics employed by the team...But these coaching rights are delegated to him by those who have ultimate responsibility for the team—the owners or board of management. The coach cannot claim that these discretionary rights are based directly on his interests in controlling the team. After all, the coach is not alone in having an interest in how things fall out for the team...Moreover the coach’s continued exercise of these rights is circumscribed by his continued success in advancing the interests of the team (and thereby also of those who own or ultimately manage the team). Why should it not in principle at least by the same with parents?
Coaches can be replaced, if losses accumulate. And if replaced against their will, they have no special ground for complaint. This is not to say that the owners or managers of the Boston Red Sox cannot be criticized for their choice of coach; only that former coaches who lodge such criticisms do so only as interested fans. Similarly, on this picture, with parents. Archard might issue the usual caveats about the impracticality and inadvisability of frequent performance evaluations, by the state, of each parent, which put their “position” under threat, should their “win/loss record” become too unfavorable. Still in principle this should all be okay:
The parent could not complain against [their] removal that it is “my child to parent as I see fit.” Anymore than the sports coach can claim that “it is my team to direct as I see fit.”
I can’t tell if Archard really believes that parents’ charge of their children is as contingent as, and is justified in the same way as, a coach’s charge of his team. Whether he believes it or not, it is surely an absurd position. It is interesting also to note how Archard’s thought experiment reverses the usual direction of analogy. He assimilates the justification of parent to that of coach; meanwhile, in every other inspirational sports movie, a great coach succeeds in drawing greatness out of his team by fostering, among his players, something like brotherhood or sisterhood.
While Archard imagines a society where parenthood is more contingent than it is, Elizabeth Anscombe notes that it is already more contingent than it used to be. Her paper “Why Have Children?” does not answer its title-question. Her goal, rather, is to make us feel the strangeness of asking it in the first place. Before the modern age, it would have been as sensible to wonder and deliberate about having children, as to wonder and deliberate about digesting one’s food:
Formerly that now natural question [of why have children] would have been a natural one only in the minds of a pair who did not propose to marry or set up any very permanent relationship...Why have children? Well, they come along, they happen, don’t they? What a funny question, “Why have children?” is. “Why want children?”—that’s a different thing. Maybe you’ve been married for years and not managed to get one and you passionately want one, you look with envy and sorrow on those who are so lucky. But “Why have children?” was a question that simply didn’t arise [...].
After evoking our lost attitude to the question, Anscombe goes on to suggest it has been for the worse:
It is distressing to live in a world where this question “Why have children?” so intelligibly presents itself—as “Why digest food?” does not. The purpose of my paper has been in the first place by that comparison to show what a weird distorted question it is.
She may be right that the question is distorted, and our current attitude toward it lamentable, but I did not grasp her reasons. “Why eat meat?” may once have been as unintelligible as “Why have children?,” but I do not think it lamentable that a meat-free life is now readily available to most. (I say this as a resolute non-vegetarian.) Anscombe was Catholic, and she read this paper at a meeting of Catholic philosophers; her reasons are certainly religious, and include her opposition to contraception and abortion. But I suspect these were not her only reasons; if she had others, I would like to know what they were.
See also: In Their Own Image.
In Catholicism, the question isn’t necessarily “do we have children” or “why have children” but more about the timing of said children, and the gaps between them, depending on your genuine needs as a family. The question of “do we even have children” as a *married couple* isn’t really in Catholic teaching, because of what we see marriage as. We’re called to both generosity and prudence in childbearing.
For me I wish the question of “why have children” wasn’t a thing, because I feel strongly that there would be more family support if children weren’t perceived as an optional extra to married life rather than the foundational reason for it. When children need a reason, then society needs that reason in order to support your choice. But if children are a given, then society can pledge support more as a given too.
I am not sure I agree with Anscombe’s grasp of Catholic theology on this or think it’s reflective of current teachings. To some extent, there have been technological changes that enable Catholic couples to licitly avoid or space children without the use of artificial birth control. Orthodox Catholics do not use artificial birth control but that does not mean they don’t engage in very hard questions about how many children to have and childbirth spacing (or whether to have more or any children depending on health conditions etc). But this has also been the case for a long time - if you look at Tamar in Genesis 38, there is a deeply profound (and ancient) discussion about the rights of a woman to have a child. Anscombe may have been directionally right that people didn’t think as much about why to have children before the invention of the Pill, but it’s also not the case that they didn’t think about it at all - or that her co-religionists don’t still think those are important questions.