Should I Have Kids?
Should I have a child — and who exactly is it for?
The question
You're thirty-four and the question won't leave you alone. Not the soft version — do I want this — the hard one, the one that wakes you up. Because you've done the maths, and the maths is brutal: the money you don't have, the planet you've watched get worse every single year of your adult life, the headlines telling you your country needs you to do this, as if your womb were a line item in someone's budget. And underneath all of it, a thought you can't quite say to anyone: that you would be reaching into the dark and pulling out a person — a whole person, with a whole life, who never asked to be here, who can't be asked, because there's no one there to ask yet. You keep trying to decide what's best for the kid. And some quiet part of you has started to suspect that the sentence "what's best for the kid" doesn't mean what you think it means — that when you go looking for the child whose interests are supposed to settle this, there's nobody home.
What you practise
"I'd only do it if I could give a kid a good life." Most people reach for it, and it sounds like the responsible one. Here you test whether it holds the weight. If your choice is what settles which child exists, better or worse for them has nothing to measure: a different choice makes a different person, not the same one better off. You also learn how far that goes, which is not far — it does not show that nobody can be wronged by being born. No verdict is handed down here. You leave able to say who you are deciding for, and what that ground rests on.
The episodes
Each episode builds on the one before, and the finale hands the question back to you sharper, not settled.
-
01
Whose decision is this?
A couple sits down with a spreadsheet to decide whether to have a child, and the exercise comes to feel obscene before the arithmetic is done. The first episode clears the table — setting aside the culture's ready answers — and finds the flaw in the sensible method — there is no one yet on the child's side of the decision to be deciding for.
▶ Listen Read transcript → -
02
You can't picture your way to this
L. A. Paul's argument about transformative experience — you cannot picture your way into this choice, because having a child remakes the chooser's values, so there is no settled you to do the weighing. Asking the people who know does not help either; what they know does not fit into words.
▶ Listen Read transcript → -
03
You can't ask the one who matters most
Everywhere else, imposing something serious and unchosen on a person requires consent or a strict justification, and Seana Shiffrin presses that standard on procreation itself, with Rivka Weinberg building on the same ground. The one reply left standing — for the child's own good — is earned seriously, and handed to the next episode to test.
▶ Listen Read transcript → -
04
There is no one there to ask
Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons (1984) and the non-identity problem — wait a few months and you do not get a better-off version of the same child, you get a different child, so "better or worse for the kid" has nothing to attach to. David Boonin then tries to hand back one piece of the broken gauge.
▶ Listen Read transcript → -
05
Always a harm — even in paradise
With the obvious gauge broken, the easy no is close at hand — and the episode refuses to let it in as a relief. David Benatar's Better Never to Have Been, arguing that coming into existence is always a harm even in a paradise, is given its full grip as the serious case a no would actually need.
▶ Listen Read transcript → -
06
If you do it, owe it everything
Julian Savulescu's principle of procreative beneficence — grant that no duty is owed to a particular child, and a reason still survives at the impersonal level, to bring about the better-off life among those one could create. The reason that survives is not the warm one that was wanted, and what it implies about the lives not chosen stays in view.
▶ Listen Read transcript → -
07
Breed for the nation? Or for no one but the two of you?
The politician's demand — baby bonuses, natalist panic — meets its refusal, and Christine Overall then reverses the burden of proof, asking why having children is treated as the default that needs no reason. Behind the cheap demand stands a serious one — an inherited world whose continuation might be owed something — and neither claim closes.
▶ Listen Read transcript → -
08
The gift you couldn't refuse
The oldest word said over a cot — gift — is examined rather than dismissed. Hannah Arendt's account of natality, the capacity for beginning on which freedom depends, gives the word its full weight; set against Benatar's harm, the gift neither fails nor wins, and the two descriptions attach to one and the same act.
▶ Listen Read transcript → -
09
On whose behalf?
The final episode asks where the idea came from that this is a private decision to be justified at a kitchen table — the spreadsheet itself has a history. No verdict is offered; the question is handed back in its honest form — on whose behalf, and on what ground, do you decide?
▶ Listen Read transcript →
Thinkers
The thinkers and traditions this series draws on:
Related series
Your turn
You are thirty-seven. You and your partner want a child. The clinic tells you to wait. Conceive now and the child will very likely be born with a condition they carry for life — a life worth living, but a harder one. Wait two years, finish the treatment, and you would almost certainly have a healthy child. Not that child made well: a different one, from a different month and different cells. Two years is a lot at thirty-seven. Your friend, a nurse, is blunt. "Why would you knowingly do that to your own kid?"
- She says waiting spares the child the condition. Which child? The one you would have now never gets the healthy life. A different child does. So worse off than what? Say what is left of her objection.
- Suppose you go ahead now. Is that child wronged? If you think so, say how without the comparison you just lost.
- If you wait, who are you waiting for? If the honest answer is the two of you, is that a reason against waiting, or just the truth?
A good answer names who the decision is for, says what that ground rests on, and shows whether "don't do that to your own kid" still means anything when there is no healthier version of that child to set beside them. Calling any life a gift and stopping there does not do that work, and neither does handing the question to the doctors.
Sources
Written by AI under human direction. This is the reading the series was built from. checked against source means the passage was found in the cited work and a second, independent model checked the episode's use of it; supports in part means that check judged the use a little stronger than the passage alone establishes; passage located means a reader found the passage but it has not had the second check. Unmarked entries are background reading.
- Emily Klancher Merchant and Win Brown — The problem with pronatalism: Pushing baby booms to boost economic growth amounts to a Ponzi scheme (2024) A short article arguing that pushing people to have more babies to support pensions and growth works like a Ponzi scheme, relying on new entrants to pay earlier ones. Free to read. checked against source
- US Pronatalism: The Trump Push for More Births Explained An advocacy group's overview of the US government's push for more births, including baby-bonus proposals and a suggested medal for mothers of six or more children. Written from one side of the debate.
- Elana Gardner — Pronatalism and the Politics of Childbirth (2026) A student newspaper piece on the 2025–26 US pronatalist policies, including the $1,000 account for each newborn and the worry about an ageing population. Free to read.
- Evelina Johansson Wilén — To Give Birth or Not to Give Birth (2026) A 2026 essay on falling birth rates, arguing that money worries and fear of the future lead people to delay or skip having children. Episode 1 names money and climate as real pressures, but argues they are not the question itself.
- L. A. Paul — Transformative Experience (2014) The book behind Episode 2. Paul argues that having a child is an experience you cannot know from the outside and one that changes what you value, so you cannot decide it by picturing the two futures and choosing the better. The link goes to a Wikipedia summary of the book, not the book itself. checked against source
- L. A. Paul — Précis of Transformative Experience (2015) Paul's own short statement of the book's argument, free to read, including her definitions of the two kinds of life-changing experience used in Episode 2. The file also carries the other papers from the same journal discussion.
- Seana Valentine Shiffrin — Wrongful Life, Procreative Responsibility, and the Significance of Harm (1999) The essay behind Episodes 3 and 8. Shiffrin argues you may harm someone without asking to spare them worse, but not just to give them something good — and having a child is the second. The link is a catalogue record, not the paper itself. checked against source
- Rivka Weinberg — The Risk of a Lifetime: How, When, and Why Procreation May Be Permissible (2016) Weinberg treats making a person as taking the risk of a whole life on someone who cannot weigh it, and argues it is allowed only when the motive is the parent-child bond and the odds of a life worth living are good. The link goes to a catalogue record, not the book. supports in part
- Derek Parfit — Reasons and Persons (1984) The book where Parfit set out the non-identity problem, including the case of the fourteen-year-old mother used in Episode 4. The link goes to a Wikipedia summary of the book; the book itself is not free to read. checked against source
- Derek Parfit — Transcript of a talk on the non-identity problem by Derek Parfit (2016) A 2016 talk transcript where Parfit walks through the case behind episode 4: a couple told to wait a few months for a healthier child, and a fourteen-year-old whose child gets a hard start. Free to read.
- Melinda A. Roberts — The Nonidentity Problem (2026) Melinda Roberts's encyclopedia entry on the non-identity problem. It sets out the problem and the main answers to it, including the view, heard in Episode 4, that a person can be wronged by being made even when no better-off version of them was possible. checked against source
- Elizabeth Harman — Harming as Causing Harm (2009) Harman's case that harming someone need not mean making them worse off than they would otherwise have been: causing a person pain or damage harms them, even if they would not have existed otherwise. The link goes to a catalogue record, not the chapter. checked against source
- Elizabeth Harman — Can We Harm and Benefit in Creating? (2004) An earlier, free-to-read paper in which Harman first sets out the same answer to the non-identity problem: causing pain, early death or bodily damage harms a person even if they would not otherwise have existed.
- David Boonin — The Non-Identity Problem and the Ethics of Future People (2014) Boonin tests every proposed answer to the non-identity problem, finds each one fails, and accepts what he calls the Implausible Conclusion: the acts in Parfit's cases are not wrong. The link goes to the publisher's catalogue page.
- David Benatar — Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence (2006) David Benatar's 2006 book argues that being born always causes harm, even in the best life, since pain is bad but missing pleasures hurt no one. Episodes 8 and 9 weigh that claim against the idea of birth as a gift. Link: a book summary. checked against source
- Kirk Lougheed — Anti-Natalism Kirk Lougheed's encyclopedia survey of arguments against having children, covering Benatar's four-part comparison, the psychological case that we overrate our own lives, and the main objections. A summary, free to read.
- Jack Maden — Antinatalism: David Benatar's Asymmetry Argument for Why It's Wrong to Have Children Jack Maden's plain-language walk through Benatar's four claims and the main objections to them. A summary article rather than Benatar's own writing.
- Fumitake Yoshizawa — A Dilemma for Benatar's Asymmetry Argument (2021) A journal article arguing that Benatar's comparison cannot do both jobs he needs from it: explain our everyday judgements and support the conclusion against having children. One example of the live dispute Episode 5 describes. The link goes to the journal's page.
- Margaret W. Matlin and David J. Stang — The Pollyanna Principle: Selectivity in Language, Memory, and Thought (1978) Matlin and Stang gave the name 'Pollyanna principle' to our habit of remembering the pleasant more readily than the unpleasant, which Benatar uses to argue we are poor judges of our own lives. The link goes to a Wikipedia summary, not their 1978 book. supports in part
- Julian Savulescu — Procreative Beneficence: Why We Should Select the Best Children (2001) The paper behind Episode 6. Savulescu argues that when parents can choose among possible children, they have good reason to pick the one expected to have the best life. Free to read. checked against source
- Adrienne Asch — Prenatal Diagnosis and Selective Abortion: A Challenge to Practice and Policy (1999) Asch's case, from the disability-rights side, that prenatal testing to select against disability sends a message about people already living with that disability, and that much of the hardship of disability comes from how society is arranged. Free to read. checked against source
- Alasdair C. MacIntyre — After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (1981) The book where MacIntyre says a person inherits debts and duties from family, city and nation. Episode 7 quotes this. MacIntyre never argues this means you should have children — the episode makes that extra step itself. Links to the publisher's catalogue page. checked against source
- Christine Overall — Why Have Children? The Ethical Debate (2012) Overall argues that the burden of proof sits on having a child, not on declining to; that a child may not be made as a means to something else; and that the best reason is the parent-child relationship itself. The link goes to a catalogue record, not the book. supports in part
- Hannah Arendt — The Human Condition (1958) The book where Arendt develops natality: the idea that every birth brings someone new into the world who can begin something no one has done before, and that human freedom rests on this. She never wrote about whether to have children — Episode 8 builds its view of life as a gift from her idea. supports in part
- Robert Farrugia Flores — The Capacity to Begin: Arendt's Concept of 'Natality' A short essay explaining Arendt's idea of natality as the human capacity to begin something new, with quotations from The Human Condition. Free to read as a scanned PDF.
- Terence Sweeney — Forever Young: Hannah Arendt and Natality (2020) An essay on where Arendt's idea of natality comes from, including her description of human beings as "newcomers and beginners by birth". Free to read.
- Viviana A. Rotman Zelizer — Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (1985) Zelizer's history of how, between the late 1800s and the 1930s, American children went from earning their keep to being economically useless but emotionally priceless. The link goes to the publisher's catalogue page. checked against source
- Demographic transition A Wikipedia summary of the shift, in country after country, from high birth and death rates to low ones: the change behind Episode 9's point that having children became a choice.
Where to start
- Derek Parfit — Transcript of a talk on the non-identity problem by Derek Parfit (2016) The philosopher who named the non-identity problem explains it himself, out loud, to a general audience, and then tries to undo some of the damage. It is the puzzle at the centre of this series in its author's plainest words, and it is free to read.
- Christine Overall — Why Have Children? The Ethical Debate (2012) A short, clearly written book that walks through the usual reasons for having or not having children and tests each one. It argues that having a child is the choice that needs justifying, so you get a guided tour of the whole debate and a position to push against.
- L. A. Paul — What You Can't Expect When You're Expecting (2015) A readable essay that starts with a couple sitting down to decide whether to have a child, and argues that imagining what parenthood would be like cannot settle it. It is the other half of the series' puzzle: the would-be child cannot be consulted, and nor, in a sense, can your future self. The author's own copy is free on her website.