Half Changed World

Immediately after I wrote yesterday’s post on Is parenting a right?, I browsed over to Daddy Types, and read about a book discussed in this week’s New York Times Book Review, called “Should Parents be Licensed?” by Peg Tittle. I think this is a horrifying notion, and wanted to make sure that my post wasn’t read as an argument in support of Tittle.

To go all poli-sci, I reject Solinger’s argument that there is a positive right to be a parent, but I believe that — in most cases — people have a negative right to freedom from government involvement in their reproductive and parenting decisions. Tittle’s argument, as far as I can tell from this column she wrote in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, is that we shoudn’t recognize this negative right either.

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that Tittle is right that if we worked at it, we could develop a “contraceptive vaccine” that could be administered routinely and reversed at will. And let’s assume further that it could be proved not to have lasting effects on either the reproductive health of the people who receive it or on the well-being of the children they eventually conceive and bear.

Even if the technological capability to make this work existed, I still wouldn’t want the government deciding who does and who doesn’t get to have kids. Tuttle dismisses this as an argument about “the potential for abuse,” even as she acknowleges that she’s “seeing a theocracy coming ever closer.” What she doesn’t seem to get is the notion that even if I could be guaranteed that the government would use my standards to decide who gets to parent (which is highly unlikely), I don’t want this to be a decision for the government to make.

Tittle’s response is that we, as a society, have already accepted government involvement in parenting decisions under certain circumstances: we take children away from their parents when they have been abused, and we require adoptive and foster parents to go through extensive screening and training. (Tittle says that people seeking access to “new reproductive technologies” are also required to go through screening and counseling, but I don’t think that’s a government requirement; I think it’s because the clinics are afraid of being sued. Does anyone reading this know? And do fertility clinics ever turn away people who have the money to pay?)

So what’s the difference? My answer is that when a child is being placed for adoption or foster care, the government has already gotten involved and is responsible for the decision. It’s qualitatively different from having the government get involved in regulating the conception and upbringing of every single child.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 25th, 2004 at 8:30 pm and is filed under Current Affairs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.