I have been wondering on this subject for a while now, and I'm not entirely sure if it's an original one or not, but thought I would share it and see what response I get.
In America, we need to have a license to drive a car. This is reasonable enough to me. When you get out on the road, you're taking not only your own life into your hands, but countless others as well. Our government also requires a license for someone to become a certified practitioner of medicine, which makes sense, because once again, other people's lives are at stake. However, there is one thing that every American is allowed to do that no one needs a license for, although they carry another person's life directly in their hands: parenting. When a person becomes a parent, they are now responsible for another person’s well-being every moment of every day for the rest of their lives.
If you’re committing to a responsibility so intense that you’re going to be working to keep this other person alive and healthy for the rest of your life, don’t you think that’s something that not everyone will be capable of doing?
There are several very tricky factors to making this work, however.
How do we decide who has the ability to be a parent? I mean, of course we don’t give these licenses to people who are going to abuse, mistreat, or neglect their children, but how are you even going to be able to tell who those people are? Do you start by giving them a pet or something equivalent to take care of first? What if they’re good with dogs, but bad with children?
How do we stop people who don’t have this ‘ability’ from becoming parents? You can’t really stop people from pro-creating, so how is this supposed to work at all - birth-control in the water?
Is it even ethical for a government to tell people they can’t have kids?
Does that contradict our freedom of choice that we’re entitled to as a democracy?
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