One might claim procreation is special because it allows for the creation of a family and parent-child relationships. The right to a found a family in the Universal Declaration is often interpreted as a right to procreate. Yet parenting and procreating are distinct activities: one can do one without the other, for example when one either adopts or gives a child up for adoption. In this section I introduce two arguments for the importance of parenthood, and then show how they could be linked to procreation.
Imagine a society, Antifamila, where an otherwise benevolent dictator, Rex, implements Plato’s vision for rearing children.Footnote 43 After birth, children, without force, are placed in state-run orphanages. This way of raising children may be wrong for several reasons. Perhaps it is not good for children or for society’s future.Footnote 44 Perhaps it violates right of gestational parents and their involved partners to parent their child.Footnote 45 More importantly, people would no longer be able to engage in parental relationships whatsoever. Imagine another ruler, Rex*, who bans red socks. Although both bans seem arbitrary and unjustified, the ban on the family seems much worse, and not only for the children born under Rex. The next sections aim to give two accounts for why this is correct.
Parental relationships. Imagine that children were produced in baby-factories. How should these children be distributed to parents? Should we give children to the best available parents, or should we evenly distribute children to those who are both willing and sufficiently competent to parent? Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift’s dual interest account of parental rights provides reasons to think that sufficiently good parents should be eligible, too. They think the interest people have in engaging in parental relationships grounds a (limited and conditional) right to parent. Parenthood is important because:
The role enables them [parents] to exercise and develop capacities the development and exercise of which are, for many (though not, certainly, for all) crucial to them living fully flourishing lives. Through exercising these capacities in the specific context of intimately loving parent-child relationships, a parent comes to learn more about herself, she comes to develop as a person, and she derives satisfactions that otherwise would be unavailable. The successful exercise of this role contributes to, and its unsuccessful exercise detracts from, the success of her own life as whole.Footnote 46
Parenting, they argue, is a way to access familial relation goods which can only be accessed through parenting. The relationship is non-substitutable by other (fiduciary) personal relationships because it combines four features: children are not in the relationship voluntarily; it is a paternalistic relationship; it inevitably includes shaping the child’s values; and, finally, the spontaneous and unconditional love parents receive from their child.
The right Brighouse and Swift defend is both conditional and limited. It is conditional being a good enough parent.Footnote 47 This is so both because the goods of parenthood can only be realized if one is a good enough parent,Footnote 48 as well as because of the weighty interest of the child in having good enough parents. It is limited, because only those powers and prerogatives necessary for the realization of the goods can be justified. This limits the kind of claims that can be made by an appeal to parental rights.
Brighouse and Swift say that their account seems ‘moderately perfectionist’, suggesting that their view may not be compatible with liberal neutrality.Footnote 49 But at least some of the goods of parenthood they identify fit with a plausible understanding of a thin theory of the good – such as self-realization, intimate and loving relationships, self-knowledge, and challenging, meaningful activities. We could add important relational goods,Footnote 50 such as love, trust, responsibility and a sense of belonging. Although the importance of relational goods cannot be elaborated here, any plausible currency of justice would have to place them among its distribuenda.Footnote 51 One could give up the claims that parenting is uniquely valuable and that the ability to engage in this kind of relationship is fundamental, while at the same time claim that parenthood gives access to a whole range of goods. One only needs to point to the tremendous impact on the distributions of goods that each plausible theory of justice needs to consider relevant to show that the distribution of parental rights matters from the point of view of justice.
To see how the perfectionist charge can be met, compare parenthood to jobs. Like parenthood, jobs give access to a wide range of primary goods: self-respect, income, responsibility, and the like. Meaningful work is an important way to access primary goods. The fact that jobs and positions come with privileges and advantages is a reason to treat their distribution especially carefully, for example by placing access to jobs under fair equality of opportunity principles. If parenthood is an important way to access goods falling under a plausible thin theory of the good, this has important implications for the protection of access to this kind of relationship.
Granting people access to parenthood might be a way to make meaningful activities available to the masses. Rawls’s description – albeit in a somewhat perfectionist vein – of the ‘Aristotelian principle’ rings true for parenthood:
Presumably complex activities are more enjoyable because they satisfy the desire for variety and novelty of experience, and leave room for feats of ingenuity and invention. They also evoke the pleasures of anticipation and surprise, and often the overall form of activity, its structural development, is fascinating and beautiful.Footnote 52
Arneson also makes the connection between parenthood and meaningful work when he says: ‘for people whose labor market prospects are poor, the opportunity to raise children is a very significant, perhaps the only feasible opportunity they have to engage in creative and meaningful work’.Footnote 53 Parenthood, then, can be seen both as an important source of meaningful activities and a source of important primary goods. This gives some pro-tanto support for allocating the right to parent widely among willing and sufficiently capable parents because this is a good way to distribute access to these important goods.
There are several possible objections to Brighouse and Swift’s account, an important one being that parenthood is not uniquely valuable: there are other ways to give people access to the goods at stake in parenthood. Parenthood, that is, is substitutable: there are other ways to access these goods. Even if this objection is right, it is limited. The goods at stake in parenthood are important, and access to parenthood is a way to distribute access to these important goods. If the goods at stake are important enough, there is at least a pro-tanto case compatible with liberal requirements for promoting access to opportunities to access these goods (parenthood being one among many).
Parenthood as Self-extension. Apart from the parental relationship and its valuable elements, engaging in parenting a child is a way of extending oneself into the future, being part of a project that outlasts one’s own life and thus being part of the world after one’s death. The ability to engage in a form of self-extension is – as argued above – important: parenting, if done well, amounts to making an important contribution to a life that will (hopefully) outlast one’s own. It is a way to engage in creative self-extension, ‘giving a child what she needs to develop from a vulnerable new-born into an autonomous adult is about as creative as it gets’.Footnote 54 Moreover, it is a very democratic way to extend oneself into the future: not everybody is able to contribute to big projects that span generations. Not all of us can be Verdis, Kants or Curies, but all those who are good enough parents can realize self-extension in this way. Parenthood is a democratic way of self-extension.
However, liberals will want to limit the extent to which parents can mold their children in their own image: parents should not treat their children as extensions of themselves. Children are separate persons who need to develop and pursue their own plans.Footnote 55 Parents may engage in self-extension ‘out of commitment to the child and the relationship’, but not ‘out of commitment to that value or project‘.Footnote 56 I do not think this limitation undermines the possibility of self-extension, as it excludes only particular ways of self-extension (those that involve purposely shaping the child’s values).Footnote 57
Parenthood or procreation? Suppose the argument for the right to parent presented so far is correct. This does not yet give us a right to procreate. One does not need to procreate in order to parent, and nothing in the account given suggests there is a right to create the child one wants to parent. If children where indeed created in baby-factories, we would have reasons for distributing them widely to willing and able parents. What this argument establishes is that people have an important interest in there being enough children to parent. The following claim can be defended:
Aggregative parenthood argument: people have a weighty interest that some people have on aggregate sufficient children to provide all sufficiently good prospective parents with children – not necessarily their own biological child.
Children, obviously, do not come from baby-factories. How should reproductive labor be distributed among those who are willing and able to produce offspring? There are three principle reasons why a right to procreate should be widely distributed among willing and capable parents. First, there are good reasons for thinking it impermissible to take children away from gestational procreators to distribute to willing and able parents.Footnote 58 Distributing procreative entitlements widely limits the need for re-allocation.
Second, transferring children from their procreators to parents is often not an option. Even though adoption gives access to the goods of parenthood, as things stand there are only a limited number of children available for adoption, not necessarily because there are no children in need of parents but because it is difficult for aspiring adoptive parents to access children in need of parents. There are important legal and financial restrictions (age, income), limits to international adoption, and adoption is often prohibitively costly.Footnote 59 In the world as it is, procreation is the only way to access parenthood for many.Footnote 60 There are good moral reasons to remove some of the unnecessary barriers to adoption, whether legal, social or financial. This is so not only for the sake of prospective parents, but especially for the sake of children in need of parents. If adoption became much easier, the parental argument for a right to procreate would be weakened, because good alternative routes to acquire the goods of parenthood would be available.
Third and finally, people want to have biological offspring. Although preference satisfaction is, in itself, not the aim of the theories of justice under discussion here, a distribution that satisfies, all other things being equal, people’s weighty (non-objectionable) preferences is better than one that does not. We can, then, offer a conditional extension of the right to parent to a right to procreate for prospective parents:
Individual parenthood argument: people have a weighty interest in procreation if it is a necessary step to access the goods of parenthood.
An important limit to the argument so far should be noted. The right to procreate is conditional on some suitable rearer having the intention to parent the child. If one does not create the child whose existence one initiates with an eye on providing someone – the procreator or someone else – access to parenthood, the argument so far offers no support for the right to procreate. This argument does not provide support for a right grounded in the desire to experiencing gestation, or the disire to create genetic offspring: the right is conditional on there being parents willing and able to enjoy the goods of parenthood.
A right to more than one? Do the arguments discussed so far count for the first as well as for the second, third (etc.) child? It seems not. If one has a right to be a parent, this right is fulfilled once one has one child (provided, of course, it grows up healthy). The second child does not provide access to the goods of parenthood, since one has parental relationships with the first child – unless the additional child is created so that others who cannot procreate will be able to parent a child. This is not simply a matter of the diminishing marginal utility of the accessed goods, it is a qualitative difference: having one child to parent relieves one of not having parent-child relationships (in the parental role), having an additional child does not.Footnote 61
This is not to say, of course, that there is nothing valuable at stake in having a second child, or that having more loving, intimate relationships is not better than having just one. Neither is it to say that people never have the right to have more than one child. However, given the lesser moral importance of being able to parent a second child, this right will be more easily overridden by other considerations. The right to the first child merits much greater protection against competing considerations because of the different goods at stake.