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Reviewed by:
  • Why Have Children?: The Ethical Debate by Christine Overall
  • Karen Stohr
Review: Christine Overall, Why Have Children?: The Ethical Debate, MIT Press, 2012

Christine Overall’s book, Why Have Children?: The Ethical Debate, begins with what would seem like an obvious point—that there are better and worse reasons to have a child. Given that that the well-being of a vulnerable and dependent creature hangs on the choice, it surely requires justification. And yet, as she illustrates, philosophers have been comparatively silent about what that justification could or should look like. In this lucid and comprehensive book, Overall sets out to remedy that situation and offer what in the end is a moral justification for having (no more than two) children.

The overarching aim of the book is to explore the moral landscape around the choice to have children. Quite reasonably, Overall takes for granted that the choice to procreate requires more justification than the choice not to procreate. But of course the reasons for and against procreating are inextricably linked to each other. Overall thus considers both arguments in favor of procreation and arguments against it, most of which she finds lacking in some respect. Her conclusion is that having a limited number of children is morally justified and indeed, morally valuable, but not morally required of anyone.

Chapter 1 introduces the project, while chapter 2 serves as a crucial framing chapter for the rest of the discussion. On Overall’s view, it is not enough to cite considerations about reproductive freedom, since the claim that there is a right to reproduce without interference does not suffice to justify the choice to reproduce. Overall does think that there is a fundamental negative (liberty) right not to reproduce against one’s wishes, as well as a positive (welfare) right to reproduce that grounds certain, limited claims on the help of others. Overall leaves it open how much help any given society is required to provide those who seek to reproduce, though she argues that any such help must be distributed in a non-discriminatory way. She also argues that the positive right to reproduce does not amount to an entitlement to the use of the gametes or uterus of another person (27). No one, she thinks, should be forced to reproduce against her or his wishes.

Chapter 3 takes up the contentious question of how to settle disagreements over whether to procreate. For the sake of simplicity, Overall limits the discussion in this chapter to a case where the prospective parents consist of one male and one female. Here the challenge is to think about the right [End Page E-6] to procreate and not to procreate in a context where the female partner’s right to bodily autonomy is also at stake. Because Overall thinks that the right not to reproduce is generally more fundamental than the right to reproduce, it would seem that either partner is in position to veto the beginning or continuation of a pregnancy. But Overall wants to reject the idea that the male partner has any right to demand that the female partner continue an unwanted pregnancy, on the grounds that it would violate her bodily autonomy. She notes that some “solutions” to this problem, such as the rather fanciful possibility of ectogenesis, still fail to take seriously the fact that the physical demands of procreation fall largely on women. In the end, Overall concludes that a woman is entitled to continue a pregnancy that she wants but that her male partner does not. (She also argues that the male partner is still obligated to provide financial support for the child, something to which I will return below.) When the male partner is the one who wants to procreate, the woman is not obligated to carry a pregnancy so as to provide him with a child. Should she decide to do so, it would be supererogatory on her part.

In chapters 4 and 5, Overall spells out a variety of different reasons that might be offered as moral justification for having children, all of which she thinks are inadequate. Chapter 4 focuses on what she describes as deontological reasons, while chapter...

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