The Ethics of Modern Baby – Making

Reprobate Mum - 19 Nov 15

In the midst of telling me about his meditation practise and gently berating my meat-eating habits, my best friend, Laird, who’s vegan, on our first Skype call in, well, ever – despite him gallivanting across the world in the 15 years since we first met at uni, in which I’ve put down roots in London and produced an increasingly gangly brood of two – told me he’s considering donating to a cause of an altogether more red-blooded variety.

At 35, as a gay male and without a regular partner, he reasoned, he might be running out of opportunities to reproduce, what with all the rigmarole producing children of his own would no doubt involve. And with chronic sperm shortages – at least where IVF couples are concerned, if not in the average teenage boy’s bedroom, donating his seminal fluid, he thought, is surely an altruistic thing to do. It will enable him the satisfaction that his genes will outlive him – up to eight times in the next generation, which is a far greater genetic legacy than I will ever hope to achieve. And Laird can continue enjoying his monkish, Buddhist-inspired existence – and travel oriented lifestyle, without the strings that having young children of one’s own would necessarily attach.

Yet, when he told me about his plan, I couldn’t help but feel a bit uncomfortable with it. Perhaps because my life, almost since graduating, has been so directed by having children – I can’t say for better or worse, because it has been my life – but one thing’s for sure, sometimes I do miss my freedom. So is he onto something: bringing kids into the world for no reason other than his desire to procreate, or is he being selfish, passing his genes on without a thought for their aftercare or for that matter, self-less, doing a good deed for infertile couples? It’s a sticky moral conundrum to unpack.

But is procreation in fact, always a selfish, egotistical act? so bound up is  having children in ideas of love, family, purpose and continuing life, which always, for whatever reason seems to come hand in hand with positive sentiment – though I would argue in these dark days of overpopulation, having reached an ecological tipping point, perhaps less so than in previous generations.

So I have thought long and hard about the ethics of producing another child, and come to conclusion that it would be slightly unethical, and certainly selfish, to have a third. Having replaced myself and my husband, I’ve done my bit to prop up an aging population, without contributing any stragglers – and, with luck, supplied myself with company at Christmas for much of my old age. And though any further children would come at a much smaller environmental cost, in terms of having all the gear, and an economy of scale, there is a point at which we have to accept that extra human beings are probably not what the planet needs right now. Mo people, mo problems, as the notorious B.I.G. almost certainly didn’t say.

Yet, having a bigger family is also associated with positive gains for individuals, especially from a psychological  – if not always material, perspective – with greater numbers of siblings correlating with higher levels of tolerance, a better support network in later life, even, if you believe in a correlation between birth order and personality, an increasingly creative genetic legacy. But when push comes to shove in a relentlessly competitive economy, where so many young people are struggling to get on their own two feet amid crippling university fees, and a depressed and chronically underpaid graduate jobs market, I can’t help feeling as if adding to my brood will only be adding to my woes, and placing an unfathomably large burden on my already tense shoulders.

Setting two kids up for life is going to take time, investment and considerable energy on the part of my husband and I, given we’re only just coming out of the woods when it comes to childcare expenses. The thought of putting a deposit down on a flat in a few years’ time, or forking out the same on university fees means our  yacht-owning dreams (a small one would do) are probably sunk before they’ve even set sail, but it’s the least I can do in ensuring  my children aren’t stuck under my roof till they’re the best part of 40.

There’s no two ways about it, bringing up kids these days costs a bomb. And even though the nature vs nurture debate is tipping ever closer towards us being puppeteered by our genes, it doesn’t absolve parents of their responsibility to fill those children’s time adequately, helping them to find the few things, be it wall climbing or coding, that capture their interest and help them through life’s ups and downs.

But that’s not the only reason that I hesitate to procreate a third time, for all my ovaries are doing a number on my brain at the moment, while all around me, my friends are dropping sprogs like their fertility’s about to fall off a cliff (oh…. thanks for the reminder, Daily Mail). Perhaps my children have been more challenging than many, what with being on the spectrum and all that. Perhaps it’s that I feel like having gone this far – where we can leave them unattended, they are no longer a danger to themselves simply by sleeping on their fronts, they no longer crap themselves, ever, and can even tell a halfway funny joke – I don’t think it would be fair on any of us, but perhaps especially, it wouldn’t be fair on me.

Far from being selfish, having a kid is, from a maternal perspective, self-sacrificial – at least for the first few months and years. Certainly it has been disruptive, having them at the beginning of my career – it probably always is, unless you can afford to outsource all but highdays and holidays. Physically and mentally motherhood has exacted a heavy burden – and left me in some ways wondering what to do with the rest of my life now my two are becoming ever more self sufficient, but in the process, much of my interests and capabilities have been neglected. Yes, it’s been tough on my husband too, in terms of sweat and sleep deprivation, but the blood and tears have been mainly my own. It doesn’t seem fair someone can just wank in a cup, and lo and behold, their contribution to the next generation is done and dusted.

So there’s a bit of me that envies Laird his reproductive dilemma. I might have outsourced part of my kids’ childhoods to various child carers over the years, while I grappled with my own demons and latched onto a fledgling career. But abdicating responsibility altogether, while enjoying more evolutionary benefits through sheer numbers alone, surely puts my life’s work into perspective. After all, since we both left uni some 12 years ago, while I’ve been bringing up baby and trying to find the time to get enough sleep, he’s been continuing to study, travelling the world, building his career, having fun and searching his soul.

Obviously, it’s all been worthwhile, hasn’t it? I wouldn’t change it for anything, not really. But it does beg the question, is it right to bring children into the world so thoughtlessly? A woman having endless kids would be criticized by a finger-wagging press, so how should we view a gay man, who might not otherwise have children, sowing cuckoo children in to the bosom of apparently loving homes – though I would question whether the idealistic notion to have a baby at whatever cost is not eclipsed by the challenges of actually bringing one up. It’s hard enough when those difficult, tantruming genes are your own, but the self-sacrifice required to bring up someone else’s must surely bring practical difficulties and repercussions of its own. Isn’t that equally irresponsible, or at least problematic, however well-intentioned?

That these resulting offspring might also be able to find my friend, aged 18, when he himself will be in his fifties also does not scare  him –  perhaps far less so, in fact, than the idea of actually being responsible for small children for the coming decade, which, I can confirm, is not always one of life’s great pleasures. But then, can he claim any responsibility for who those children might have become in the meantime? I  suspect the similarities might startle him, particularly, when, as previously mentioned, twin studies suggest nature and not nurture is increasingly taking responsibility for who we turn out to be –  and, in another little twist of the equality knife, another study shows children carry a greater proportion of their father’s genes in any case.

Perhaps, then, it’s the little things that add up to a big difference where bringing up kids is concerned, such as the vitamin D I give Jonah that has seen him shoot up like a weed over the last few months, or the extra patience with which I manage his foibles that has ensured he’ll probably not end up shooting up in jail. Parented with less patience, I don’t doubt he would have greater issues to contend with – something that could prove problematic for non-genetic parents without the evolutionary desire to prove your kids are alright, whatever unusual characteristics they might be born with.

I guess in the end, I have to take a Benthamite view about increasing happiness. Having a third child, it has been found children does not increase parents’ happiness, through one or two children do, eventually. I would argue that a child with one known parent is marginally less likely to be as happy as a child with two known parents. Though my friend is right to counter that we, both of us, grew up in traditional families of the 80s and 90s -in the sense they were broken, with various divorces and the addition of stepfamilies complicating thing. Whatever the intention our parents had when they conceived us (and it’s entirely probable there wasn’t any intention there at all), they weren’t able to see it through to the bitter (by which I mean of course, happy) ending. In a sense, there’s no such thing as a “normal” family.

And those couples I have known – in my case, mainly lesbian couples, who have used donor sperm, seem to produce fairly well rounded kids – at least as well rounded as the rest of us, with all our flaws and quirks and challenges. And yet, the adoptees I have known as young and older adults have also shared, to a greater or lesser extent, an identity crisis about their origins, for all they may have otherwise led happy and fulfilled lives.

I guess my sense of objection boils down to the selfish love I have for my children, one in which I see parts of myself reflected in them, and in which I take pride in their achievements as my own. Coupled with a benign blankness I often feel about other people’s babies and the near obsessive love I had as a child for my mother, who left when I was baby, I’m left to surmise that the parent child bond is unique, for all but the truly selfless – those who are capable of bringing up other people’s children, and I know from my abortive attempts at childminding when the kids were younger,  I’m not one of those.

Yet, my own desire to become a parent was partly to address the sense of loss I felt in my own childhood, and the way I parent my children is so coloured by this one salient point – of being largely raised by a loving by nonetheless, unrelated, stepmother –  that I find it hard to separate the emotion from the facts.  According to the Daily Mail,children born by sperm donor are just as happy as those born to ‘ordinary’ families – whatever they may be. But it’s perhaps the individual stories – like my own –  from people mourning a parent they never knew, which might make someone thinking of donating sperm think twice.

So, I would ask my vegan friend, if you are so unwilling to take life thoughtlessly, as I do everytime I eat a box of chicken nuggets – which I did at the weekend, though I spared a thought for the unhappy chickens who may have produced them – then why would you give life so carelessly? Surely bringing people into existence without a thought for their care afterwards is at least bad as killing animals for food, whatever negligible welfare standards may or may not be applied. Children are not chickens. Their emotional needs are vast, and are perhaps intrinsically linked to identity, which is bound to who they are, which is, in a sense, who their parents are.

And yet, many women who become pregnant and go on to become contented parents with well adjusted children, don’t have a baby in mind when it’s conceived. My own son, who was once such a momentary misjudgement – though never regretted, not once, not even when he was having his worst tantrum, and I was in the deepest darkest post-natal depression – with brutal logic has pointed out to me , “it would have been better for me never to have been born, because I would not know what it is to suffer, and I would not know what I was missing.”

Perhaps it is better to have never been. I’m sure the chickens who made my chicken nuggets at the weekend would agree. But my son has brought me, like his sister after him, more meaning, more purpose, more value to my life than anything before or since, and so, for that reason, I’m very, very glad he’s here. Perhaps one could argue that sperm donation is more egotistical or narcissistic or selfless than becoming a parent with a partner and bringing up a child afterwards. But no means of reproducing is ever strictly altruistic, because the gift of life is given, in a sense, by the baby to its parents – by bringing something into existence that’s more than just themselves. So it’s up to the child, then, just as it is for Laird, to decide whether or not it’s worth handing on. If it is, I guess the means by which we do it is up to the individual, however others might judge your choices. But from that perspective, I’d say to my friend, welcome to parenthood! It’s a minefield, however you go about it.

By Reprobate Mum. Read more at www.reprobatemum.com or follow on Twitter @reprobatemum

Reprobate Mum

East London dwelling mum to two bandy-legged pre-tweens, and a pug called Johnny. Huff Post blogger, copywriter, ex-journo, whose philosophical musings on life, death and everything in between have been featured in The Sunday Times Magazine, Marie Claire, Mumsnet and La Repubblica.

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