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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (17241)	4/22/2010 6:22:40 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

The minimum level of responsibility for having kids is a reasonable expectation of being able to protect them from violence. The world used to be (and in some places still is) a more consistently violent place. If being reasonably confident in being able to protect children from the violence, or in general from horrible suffering, was near universally considered the requirement at the time, than there probably wouldn't be a human race any more. For many people, esp, people not in modern societies (either in more primitive conditions because they where in the past, or because they are in one of the world's least developed places), having children is/was a very strong default position (and not just because the lack of contraception in the past, and the relative lack in the most primitive places on Earth today). "The kids are going to suffer", or "The kids might get killed", wouldn't be enough justification not to have kids. Advanced societies have (or at least significant portions of them have) developed a different attitude, some believing they should have kids only if they can give the kids a decent life, some even going so far as to make the default position not to have kids, and only having kids by accident, or if they can feel some reason to do so. But that attitude, or at least having it be held by more than very few people, is a relatively recent development. I submit that for most people throughout history and for many people today "a reasonable expectation of being able to protect them from violence" simply isn't considered a minimum level of responsibility in order to have kids. Once you have them the normal expectation is that you will try to protect them from violence, but the thought isn't/wasn't that if you where not relatively sure you could, that you shouldn't have kids.