The lack of acknowledgment that childbearing can be a moral choice may be due to its assimilation to other processes thought to be normal parts of human life — like the phenomena of “falling in love” or being sexually attracted to another person. These aspects of human life are often regarded as the product of drives or instincts not amenable to ethical evaluation. For example, philosopher James Lenman claims that asking why we want children is “foolish,” for “it is partly just because we’re programmed that way much as we are for sex.” Some people, women in particular, believe that there is a “biological clock” inside them that generates a deep drive to have a child. It appears to be more than a simple desire to have a child; it is felt more like a biological force and is therefore very compelling. This drive is sometimes explained in evolutionary terms: Our very biological constitution determines that we bear children. The popular press likes to refer to the existence of a supposed “mommy gene.” Biologist Lonnie Aarssen writes about an apparently nongendered “parenting drive,” which he describes as “an explicit desire to have children in the future” and which involves “an anticipated experience of contemporaneous pleasure derived directly from ‘real-time’ parenthood per se.”
The questions we should ask are whether such a desire is either immune to or incapable of analysis and why this desire, unlike virtually all others, should not be subject to ethical assessment. There are many urges apparently arising from our biological nature that we nonetheless should choose not to act upon or at least be very careful about acting upon. Even if Aarssen is correct in postulating a “parenting drive,” such a drive would not be an adequate reason for the choice to have a child. Naturalness alone is not a justification for action, for it is still reasonable to ask whether human beings should give in to their supposed “parenting drive” or resist it. Besides, the alleged naturalness of the biological clock is belied by those growing numbers of women who apparently do not experience it or do not experience it strongly enough to act upon it. As psychologist Leta S. Hollingworth wisely noted almost a century ago, “There could be no better proof of the insufficiency of maternal instinct as a guaranty of population than the drastic laws which we have against birth control, abortion, infanticide, and infant desertion.”
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