To procreate or not to procreate, that is the (light-hearted) question...

..directed to us all as a human race!
Never fear I'm not turning the blog into a reality version of Big Brother and I don't welcome phone in votes on what our Friday night activity should or shouldn't be!!

I am hoping though for some interesting debate on the topic, which I half heartedly tried to initiate on Facebook. It could however be seen as quite confronting, particularly if you do have children already. I do not intend this to be derogatory to anyone who has a family but merely want to ruminate on some points raised by environmentally aware workmates in one of our stimulating (yet quite depressing!) morning tea climate change conventions ;-).

As a friend so rightly stated - There are so many issues and philospohical struggles in exploring the question, let alone attempting to answer it - but I hope some people do! To get your minds cogitating I have used the quite brilliant response of a friend to this very question on procreation - as a stepping stone for others thoughts and opinons....I think he covers everything I would have liked to discuss and more!!

1. What is the implied link between impending doom and procreation? You specified global warming. Does this mean the link is that less people means less (polluting) activity and therefore less warming? Or is it that even though the dire warnings about what will happen by the "end of this century" don't seem so far away for a newborn, and you don't want to commit someone else to a life living through such circumstances.

2. Selfishness V Proceation. I'm intrigued by the not-having of children being defined as selfishness. This seems similar to the reasoning of the Catholic church decades ago when they frowned upon contraception as effectively being a pre-emptive abortion, as it was preventing life from occurring. The trick is when this theory is expanded, then any married person of child-bearing age would have to be either pregnant, or "actively pursuing" pregnancy to be deemed anything other than selfish. I find that a bit harsh (especially once a family gets to it's 15th child).

3. Selfishness AS Procreation. I sometimes see people whose main goals in life is to raise some children. While it's necessary to have a desire to have children (to avoid extinction) i feel that some people fall back on that as a psuedo main purpose for their life. I sometimes wonder if procreation in this case can be some self-indulgent, if not selfish, in that lives are being created just to fill a void in someone else's life. Contrastingly, we have people like the deputy PM who have foregone the opportunity to have children to serve the country (and been criticised by a certain senator for being 'barren') and i think it would be more selfish for her to rob the country of her skills (presumably she is the second best leader in the country) so that she could have the joy of taking kids to playgroup.

4. Right to life V Earth's resources. The question use the phrase "allow a life to enter the world". That in itself is an interesting topic. Who is in charge of who can and can't come in to the world. It's an issue a friend of mine faced. He is genetically blind, so does he choose to have children, knowing that he is passing on the possibility of the condition? It's a hard call to make, to seemingly decide whether someone "deserves" a life (echoes of the "supreme race") or whether the quality of that life would be worth living. This is where the earth comes in. Clearly there is a maximum number of people that the world can sustain (eg. with food) but in the past this was not a problem because we were nowhere near it. But now that we adding a billion people every decade or two, it's becoming more of an issue. It seems cruel to "not allow" life to enter the world, but it would seem equally cruel that thousands of people die each day from starvation.

5 Train tracks dilemma. This is the one where a train is heading uncontrollably (ie no brakes) towards a village where it will kill 100 people on impact. You are in the engineer's control box and you have the option to flick the switch that diverts the train to the other line, where it will do the same to 10 people. Do you flick the switch? Essentially the issue is what is the best solution, versus what one's conscience feels easier about. Some people choose to let the train go, on the basis that by taking action they would be "killing" 10 people, whereas the other 100 are seemingly dying of "natural" causes, and it is not our fault (even though we had the power to stop it). There's a variation where the 10 people are friends and the 100 are strangers - often our conscience is swayed by the "closeness" of the damage. There's another where the 100 are very seriously injured, but the 10 would die. Sometimes the severity affects the decision. All this may sound vague, but the connection is that adding more population is like sending the train to slightly inconvenience the 100 (or in the earth's case 6 billion) for the sake of 10 lives (or in the case of a family, maybe 2). Of course the difference with global warming is that the train does have brakes, if only we would apply them soon enough.