While the consent argument focuses on the fact that reproduction is putting someone in harm’s way, with some harms being potential and others absolutely certain, without prior consent, it is also important to emphasize the very idea of creating a person, meaning, making the most critical decision in someone’s life which is that that person will exist, and without that person’s consent.
Most people accept this situation and take it as obvious despite there being something crazy about it. Although society supposedly highly considers the individual and their freedom of choice, people are totally silent about the fact that in spite of there being no decision more crucial for an individual than their very creation, in this matter they have no choice. And even worse is that not only does the created person not consent to his own creation, but consent is also not given to each and every one of a person’s formative conditions such as the genetic constitution, the parents, the living environment, the first formative experiences, the first stimulations while in utero, the era, the culture, the society, the gender, the heritage, the sexual orientation, the physical traits, the mental traits, and many other crucial factors, none of which is the choice of the person who would be most affected by them. All these factors are highly crucial in shaping the life and personality of the created person and yet none of them are chosen by the created person.
Moreover, the shaping and decisive effect of these non-chosen factors can’t really be affected by the person created by them. So in fact, each and every one of the most crucial factors in shaping a person, factors that would have a decisive effect on a person’s life, that very person has no choice or a real deep influence on them, nor do they consent to any of them.
Reproduction is a form of compulsion because people are created in a certain location, that is geographically as well as socially and culturally, and despite that this specific location has a crucial effect on their shaping they don’t get to choose it.
Reproduction is a form compulsion because people are created in certain timing, and despite that this specific timing has a crucial effect on their shaping they don’t get to choose it.
Reproduction is a form compulsion because people are created without the ability to support themselves, and they didn’t choose this dependency. This dependency has another crucial effect and that is that created people are totally dependent on certain people to support them, and as such these people with whom the created people develop such a strong dependency have a crucial effect on the created people, yet these people weren’t chosen by the created people.
Reproduction is a form of compulsion because people are created into a certain social order including racial division, national division, gender and ethnic discrimination, socioeconomic classes, historical and cultural heritage etc., which they haven’t chosen or designed in any way yet all of which surely shape them in many ways.
Reproduction is a form of compulsion because people are created with a certain genetic constitution that has a crucial shaping effect on them and yet they don’t get to choose it.
Reproduction is a form of compulsion because people are created with a certain body, a certain gender, a certain sexual orientation, a certain character etc., that all have a crucial shaping effect on them and yet they don’t get to choose any of it.
This is of course beyond a conceptually problematic matter, since on a very practical level people are stuck in situations that were forced on them without them choosing anything about them or giving consent. This includes abusive parents, serious inborn diseases, hostile and violent living environments, complications in childbirth due to medical malpractice, parents’ neglecting behavior during pregnancy that affected the created person, a highly undesirable personality, a society that discriminates based on a background the created person belongs to, etc.
Most people are dissatisfied with at least some things bound with their life circumstances yet they have no other choice but to live with them. It is very hard if at all possible to change basic personality, and anyone who has a character trait they don’t like is pretty much stuck with it. And this is also true about other meaningful aspects of life.
Many people would like to be other than what they are, or at least that something fundamental about them would be different than it is and that its effects would be neutralized, but this is beyond their power. In many senses people are stuck with themselves as a product of their life circumstances that they haven’t chosen for themselves. And we need not necessarily imagine miserable people or depressed people, anyone who is dissatisfied with something about themselves or in their life can’t really take full responsibility and change it from the root, certainly not without costs, because things are so settled, and from such an early stage, that it is difficult if not impossible to radically change them. It may be possible to effectively place some cover layers but it is uncertain that this can really prevent the original factors from sprouting beneath these layers or shaping them as well. This is in itself a problem that makes many people miserable because of the original thing that bothers them and because of the frustration derived from their inability to radically affect it. And this is a problem in a wider and more general term since this is a highly unfair situation. In that sense reproduction forces an unfair situation on people at the individual level and it replicates an unfair situation in general which is that people are forced to deal with problems they haven’t chosen or created in any way.
No one chose any of the traits of their own existence, and each of them has a crucial part in shaping a person’s existence, in fact they are a person’s existence. No one chose their genetic material, their environment, their family, etc. and everyone has to live with all that and with their effects. Therefore, in many senses, it was forced on everyone to be the person they are.
Everything has a crucial effect and yet nothing was chosen and prior consent was never given to anything.
It’s not just that we haven’t chosen our first name or whether to “come in to existence”, we haven’t chosen anything about ourselves. And when we supposedly could, it would already be too late since most things were already determined. When people are mature enough to examine the traits of their lives it is too late. The effects of the traits of each person are already rooted by that time so even a very critical examination of them can only be a product of these very same traits that are examined, and also, it is very hard if not impossible to retroactively cancel their effects. Therefore, all that is left to do for anyone who is not satisfied with the “package” they got, is to struggle to change things that are so elementary and basic in people’s personality and character, things that have been designed by very powerful elements, that it is unclear whether it is even possible to retroactively change later in life, and probably they will be doubly frustrated, one time from the “package” itself, and then from the inability to really change it.
Once we produce someone we inevitably place that person in a certain position and under certain conditions that s/he did not choose. And this place and these conditions have a decisive effect on the design of the created person. Again, not by his will and not by his choice. The conditions into which a person is born determine to a large extent who s/he will be and the life s/he is expected to have. We know that stimulations in the womb and the place in the family order (first-born, middle child, child of old parents, etc.) have a significant effect in determining values and approach to life.
Reproduction puts people in a place that from that moment on they have no choice but to adapt and get along with it. This place dictates the character of people, their horizon in terms of who they can be and what they can do in life, their beliefs, values, etc.
We prefer to look at ourselves as completely free beings who can decide for ourselves who we are, what we do and where we are going, while to an utterly decisive extent we are the product of the conditions of our creation, that is, of conditions that we did not choose. In this sense, all our choices are based on circumstances that we did not choose, so the question arises to what extent are they ours? And to what extent have we chosen to be who we are?
People are much more a product of their genetic load + their uterine environment + their initial life experiences + their parents + their immediate environment + their distant environment (era, society, country, history, culture, etc.) than they are independent free beings.
You don’t have to be a determinist to understand that this is the case. It does not necessarily require that certain things happen and/or in a certain order, but it does mean that things outside the boundaries set for people due to personality limitations and other abilities, beliefs, etc., will not happen. That is, it necessarily limits the horizon of people’s ambitions and dreams. And the fact that the desires and dreams of people are the product of the circumstances of their formation, does not solve the problem by itself, since there is a gap, for the majority of people, between who they would like to be and what they would like to happen in their lives, and who they actually are, what is actually happening in their lives, and even what could happen to them in their lives realistically. And this gap creates lots and lots of frustration. In other words, the fact that not only people and their lives are largely shaped by the circumstances of their formation that they did not choose, but also their desires and dreams are a product of those circumstances, still creates a gap between dreams and reality and people are still victims of this gap, usually for their entire lives.
Reproduction is to impose on others a reality that was not chosen by them in any way, that they will not have the power to change because its conditions are assimilated very deeply and very strongly from the age of zero and in fact everything is based on them, including the desire, if there is one, to change the reality of their lives. People are the product of the conditions that created them and therefore these can only be examined from within the given reality these very same conditions have created, and never from outside of it. A person always examines her/his values and perceptions only through her/his values and perceptions and only after they have already been assimilated into that person. In other words, the horizon of people’s criticism is also a product of the conditions of their formation and therefore neutralizes the ability to overcome those conditions since the criticism is of reality from within the very same reality and this is not something that can really be done. The maximum possible is to stretch the limits of the given reality but only with the tools and limitations of that given reality.
In the more radical sense of coercion, one can say that no one will ever be something that is not a product of the conditions of their creation. In this sense there is really no such thing as autonomy. And it is the deeper sense that is the bigger problem.
It is impossible not to impose a certain reality on someone and it is impossible for someone to develop into someone who is not in accordance with this reality. Birth is the imposition of a certain reality which in turn is the imposition of a certain life on someone.
The vast majority of people take this situation for granted even though there is something crazy about it. Although human society seemingly places a great deal of emphasis on the individual and her/his freedom of choice, it is completely silent in the face of the fact that although there is no more crucial decision for individuals than their creation, although there is nothing more decisive in a person’s life than the conditions of their creation, including their genetic load, their parents, their immediate environment certainly in the first stages of formation, the initial formative experiences, the uterine environment, the first stimuli during pregnancy, and also those experienced years later, these and many other factors are not subject to the choice of any created person and can hardly be influenced by any person. In fact, for each and every one of the most decisive factors in the design of a person, factors that will have a decisive effect on the life of each person, the created person has no choice or influence and none of these factors is given any consent.
Some might argue that existence is not forced on people since they can always stop it. But it is not true that people can always end their existence and even if it were true, people who choose to end their existence do not cancel their existence but end the continuation of their existence, therefore they do not offset the coercion effect. Even if they had a safe, convenient, simple and available option to end their existence, without countless inherent difficulties and obstacles, their existence is still imposed on them. In fact, this claim only increases the element of coercion in reproduction, since what it actually offers to people who are not satisfied with the existence imposed on them is to essentially stop their existence, that is, it forces them to kill themselves. And for people to kill themselves is a super complicated and complex task physically, legally, socially and emotionally. This is because from a biological point of view people are built to survive and therefore death (or severe pain, or serious injury in the event that the attempt does not work as planned) is very discouraging, from a social point of view it is an option that is considered defeatist and cowardly and therefore there is concern about what people will think of them, from a legal point of view it is of course prohibited and therefore simple, safe and cheap means are not available to people, and emotionally they are connected to the people around them and therefore do not want to hurt them. All these and more force people to be trapped in their misery. So the “solution” of ceasing existence not only does not solve the compulsion involved in existence and in the circumstances of existence, it is actually a suggestion that is in itself another compulsion.
Not only the infamous claim that if life is not good for you, you can always kill yourself, or the consent claim of course, the coercion claim is incredibly related to many other claims, for example the gamble argument which it greatly strengthens because once we are aware of how crucial the basic conditions of existence are for the rest of someone’s life we understand more in depth how big is the gamble we are making at someone else’s expense. A bad genetic trait that turns out to be inherited by someone is likely to have a profound effect on the rest of their life. Same goes for the environment into which someone was born, first encounters at critical stages of development, initial interactions, etc. The profound impact of practically everything sharpens the idea of how reproduction is a gamble.
And another note in the context of gambling, the idea of changing an attribute of an existing person, let’s say by introducing a substance that knows how to change specific genes, sounds horrifying to us, it feeds scripts of horror and dystopian movies. So while when we create someone we don’t change the attributes of an existing person, we definitely determine the attributes of someone, so even if it shouldn’t be as horrifying an idea, it should at the very least be a very disturbing idea. When we create someone we don’t choose a specific trait that is desirable in our view for someone else, since we don’t know what those traits will be for those who will be created, but this does not neutralize the problematic character of the idea since in the case of selecting features at least we know what will come out, while in the case of creating a person it is an absolute gamble on someone else’s features. Even if it is not done directly, that is, it is not that the parents choose the characteristics of their children when they create them, we can certainly say that creating a person is choosing the situation in which someone will have features that they did not choose. And if you insist and claim that no one had a choice, including the parents, the situation is still that someone (almost without exception the parents) chose that someone will have traits that no one chose, including those who will be the owners of those traits. In this sense it can be said at the very least, that whoever chooses to create someone, chooses for that person to be the bearer of certain traits that that person did not choose.
And if anything, we need not be shocked by choosing a trait for a child through genetic selection, but much more from choosing nothing and whatever comes out comes out. That is, we have two situations: a net gamble, or at least a partial selection of a number of desirable traits, most likely assuming they are positive, by whoever will raise the child. Therefore, if anything, what should be troubling is the situation where you do not choose anything in advance deliberately and give full control to luck and randomness. Don’t misunderstand, this is not an expression of support for genetic selection, but is said solely to point out the absurdity of the moral panic over genetic selection, even though the idea behind it is to improve the opening conditions of those who will be created, as opposed to the complete silence precisely regarding the lottery which is random reproduction.
In the case of creating a person who is not satisfied with the set of circumstances of her/his life, this someone nevertheless has to deal with them throughout life. In any other scenario, we would think that it is really unfair that someone has to carry something they don’t like and didn’t choose for their whole life. The answer will usually be something like “what can you do, life is not fair”, but when something is not fair, and in this case it is not necessary, it is an excellent reason not to do it. There is definitely something to be done about the fact that life is not fair, and that is not to create more of it.
In conclusion, most crucial things about people have been imposed on them. They cannot agree to them in advance and it is doubtful that they could ever change them if they wanted to. Not only the very fact of existence is imposed on everyone who exists, but also many elements in everyone’s existence. A life that begins with coercion and that involves so many imposed factors and zero consent, should not begin.