Opt-in Parenthood
What if we changed child birth from opt-out to opt-in? I’m not talking about changing laws, just changing social norms and how we talk and think about the act of reproduction.
Right now, for most of our society, having children is the default and not having children is an active choice that people make. People say things like “When are you having kids?” all the time.
For most of human history it made sense that having kids was the default. Before widespread access to effective birth control, if you were having sex, you would likely have some kids at some point. It was also often necessary to have kids as a source of bonded manual labor to ensure that your family could be productive enough to survive.
But today we have access to myriad forms of birth control which can be used before, during, or after sex. Furthermore, changes in the structure of our society and economy mean that (at least in our part of the world) kids are no longer needed to help provide for the family. In fact, usually the opposite is true and children represent a net drain on familial economic resources for at least the first two decades of their lives.
These days there is no good reason for anyone to have a child unless they really want one. And yet, because the default assumption is that everyone should have children, many people treat it as a forgone conclusion and have children not because they consciously made a decision to have children but because they didn’t consciously make the decision not to.
This might seem like a trivial difference but it would almost surely have a huge impact on birth rates, poverty, crime, and a whole host of other issues.
If you look at something like the decision whether or not to become an organ donor, the default assumption has a huge effect on participation. In counties like the U.S. where you need to check a box to become an organ donor, rates of participation are typically 15-30%. Contrast that to countries like Austria where you have to check a box if you want to opt-out of organ donation and all of a sudden you get participation rates in the 90% range.
I’m not suggesting that if we started treating child birth as “opt-in”, we’d all of a sudden have only 15-30% of people having kids but I suspect that people would think about it differently and it would be significantly more common for people to forgo making the choice to have kids.
There wouldn’t be any legal barriers preventing anyone who wanted kids from having them, just a healthier psychological framework in which to evaluate such a life altering decision.
One of the biggest things that we can do in developing countries to address climate change is educating women. This isn’t because educated women generate less CO2 themselves, but because they tend to have fewer children and right now, having fewer children is one of the best ways to cut down your carbon footprint. This is even more true in the U.S. since each of our children has a much bigger carbon footprint than those in the developing world. I think it’s likely that making “opt-in” the social norm for childbirth instead of opt-out would have a similar impact resulting in fewer children and a happier climate.
In this day and age there is absolutely no excuse for people having children that they don’t actually actively want. Let’s stop assuming that everyone is going to have kids and start assuming that they won’t unless they decide they want to.