[img]7|left|||no_popup[/img]Who among us hasn’t wondered about an individual’s parenting qualifications? We hear stories in the news, we see people in the neighbourhood restaurants – examples abound of parents who neglect their children and, in some tragic cases, harm or kill them outright. While my colleague Mike Hennessey and I would disagree on abortion, we certainly share concern over the welfare of these children. I would even take it beyond the children themselves. Consider this: The global population has gone from an estimated 791 million in the 1700s to an estimated 6.7 billion today. Clearly, how we handle birthing and raising children, in both quality and quantity, is of critical importance to our society, our culture and our planet. Mr. Hennessey’s suggestion of licensing potential parents, however, is unworkable.
 
It certainly feels like a good solution on the surface. In an era in which smaller families means fewer of us are exposed to the practical realities of rearing children, tying some sort of parenting education with a license to have children feels like a desirable option. After all, we do want children to be raised by parents who love them and have the means to support them as they grow into adulthood.
 
Mr. Hennessey offers a number of ideas of how a licensing system would work – see his article, Children and Licensing. Unfortunately, there are two major overlapping problems with his proposal, which even he admits may be a bit far out. The first problem is enforcement. Not only must a legal framework be created for the licensing itself, but training and laws must be established to guide hospitals, social workers and city clerks in administering the system and evaluating individuals. To this we can add other questions: For those children whose parents never qualify – will the foster system be responsible for them until such time that they are adopted, if they are adopted at all? And what happens if individual social workers or license-issues become corrupt, gaming the system for financial gain by selling access to babies or selling licenses to unqualified individuals? Bottom line: The license administration would also require a police apparatus of some kind. Given how many people there are, this apparatus would have to be pretty large, requiring either a massive expansion of the current healthcare/social work/justice system or the creation of a new bureaucracy. While Mr. Hennessey argues against placing a dollar value on children, that doesn’t change the huge expense that comes with such a massive system. Nor does it alter the fact that this elaborate scrutiny placed on people would be a direct assault on individual freedom, privacy and patient-doctor confidentiality.
 
Licensing may not even be practical. Consider the analogous, but obviously not identical, issue of overpopulated China’s one-child policy, which illustrates the difficulty in enforcing measures associated with having and raising children. As mobility and wealth increase, says a report by New England Journal of Medicine (http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/353/11/1171), “Economic disincentives are not a deterrent to many wealthy people, and increased freedom of movement has made it difficult for family-planning authorities to track down people if they choose to flout the regulations.”
 
This brings me to the second, related problem of the slippery slope. It’s a small step from initial licensing to continued government monitoring to ensure that parents are properly adhering to the requirements of the license. Parenting, then, effectively would be removed from parents. Worse is the possibility of the system becoming corrupted for eugenic purposes. We start with people who are undergoing psychiatric care, criminals and other people obviously unsuitable to raising kids. Then we weed out people known to have hereditary diseases; children shouldn’t have to be subjected to bad genes. And from there comes a nutjob who wants to maintain the purity of the mother race. If you think it can’t happen, consider the Nazi eugenics program in which thousands were forcibly sterilized for genetic and racial impurities. If you think it can’t happen here in the U.S., consider that the Nazi eugenics program was based on American programs innovated in California and other states. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/
 
Still, as Mr. Hennessey says, “Something must be done to stop the abuse, abandonment and killing of children.” If a regulatory system of the kind Mr. Hennessey proposes wouldn’t work, what will?
 
An Alternative
 
No solution, of course, can be 100 percent. But what we need is for people to regulate themselves. The question is how to encourage this. First, our culture needs to water down the obsession with children. While children may be the be-all-end-all for some people, this isn’t, nor should it be, universally true. By reducing the cultural expectations that all people have children (or be seen as deficient weirdos), we’d potentially reduce the number of people pressured into being less-than-enthusiastic parents. In other words, having children should not be a social obligation, especially when the planet has 6.7 billion people on it, but the result of an informed, loving decision.
 
In more practical terms, what we need is actually nothing revolutionary: Comprehensive sex education accompanied by a cultural message that sex is not a bad thing, is a matter of personal preference, but something that should be enjoyed responsibly. This means contraception, of course, which brings me to perhaps the most critical thing we can do beyond educating people about all the currently available options: Have men share the burden we have placed on women in regards to contraception by developing a male birth control pill. There are, in fact, several male pills (http://malecontraceptives.org) undergoing research and testing, although we are years away from seeing them on the market. Historically, male pill research has been underfunded and ignored for reasons of gender bias. If men “man up,” however, and we increase the contraceptive tools available, then we take another step towards ensuring that every pregnancy is wanted. (Imagine: A child can only be conceived when both men and women go off their respective pills.) And by reducing the number of children born to unprepared parents, we can, in turn, reduce child abuse, abortions, and even mitigate the problems of overpopulation.

Frédérik Sisa invites you to visit www.inkandashes.net.