The Case Against Kids

667 Words3 Pages
In the article “The Case Against Kids: Is Procreation Immoral?” by Elizabeth Kolbert, the author lists and gives examples of how procreation is immoral. Kolbert gives examples dating all the way back to the 1830’s, by Charles Knowlton. She refers to a few other philosophers opinions on the topic, including; Christine Overall and David Benatar. Each of them offer reasons as to why procreation is immoral.The point that the author is trying to make is that there really is no reason to have kids. Kolbert starts off talking about the ideas of Charles Knowlton. Knwolton’s original ideas stemmed from him fearing overpopulation of the world. He used the birth rates from the 19th century to calculate the future population of the world. He figured out that the number of people on earth would double three times every century, and that by 1930 the world population would be 8 billion people, and by 2030 it would be 64 billion. The population today is expected to hit 8 billion around 2025. He says that people can still have sex for pleasure, but they should take measures to prevent conceiving children. He talks about early forms of birth control, from which the way they sound, probably were not very effective. When Knowlton’s pamphlet “Fruits of Philosophy” first came about, the birth rates in both the United States and Britain dropped severely. Knowlton was one of the first people to separate sex and reproduction; and children were now a choice; his ideas enabled people to still have the pleasure of sex without having to worry about having children. Christine Overall is a philosophy teacher at Queens University in Quebec, Canada. Right away Kolbert acknowledges that Overall thinks that childbearing is not “natural”. The first reason that Overall dismisses is that people say having a child benefits the child. By this people mean that if a child is not born, then they cannot
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