In the ages of recent history there’s a constant rationality behind the natalist question; that having children is not only moral duty, a must, “leaving your seed on this Earth”, but also a “natural” act. We may say that this is done because of religious influence, but religious influence has waxed and waned in recent times, intensifying in some places and decreasing in others while colonialy expanding around the world (see recent christianizing missions in Oceania). Taking a stand we may say that morality, while traditionally tied to “official” religion, can and is independent of it, and that it rather is an expression of power of the hegemon over the population . See how Humanity has been made the fixed idea of modern times, the moral duty of powers and nations to promote and defend Human Rights, the liberallistic dogmas of societies born out of respect, and so on.
Having children is a Human Right, tidily confined under the label “reproductive rights”. But we know what Human Rights, and rights as a whole, mean and entail. Freedom of speech and press rights may sound well, but they institutionalize and set in law that press and words are the only meaningful way to express opinions, and opinions expressed in violent matters are to be discarded. Freedom of religion gives to every person the right to choose it’s own religion, also known as choosing their own masters, and as such freedom of religion means freedom for religions to ensare its followers. It is easy for us, then, to see through the cause behind reproductive rights: to ensure the reproduction of soon-to-be workers, to perpetuate the myths behind “continuing the family” and “settling down”, to make having children the way to “leave your mark upon this world”… in short, to perpetuate the myth that having children is good for society as a whole and that not having children is more-or-less betraying society and your own family. By making “having children” a right you set upon stone the myth that having children is a moral duty, that it is good for society, the same way that “freedom of religion” makes the case for following a religion being “a moral duty”.
And we can see also how institutionalized morality under reproductive rights is just a facade for the biocontrol of the fundamentally biological aspect of having children. Under the same framework of Reproductive Rights there has been both justification and condemnation for anticonceptives. This flexibility is just an effectuation of biological power over a “reproductive unit”, all neatly wrapped under the fact that it ignores asexual people and the rest of the LGTBA+ community as a whole, for example. Both the rethoric against anticonceptives and the liberal distribution of anticonceptives pressuposes that it is “natural” (moral establishment slang for “good”) for people to have sex, even if both positions seem fundamentally opposed.
And we see this whole having children and anticonceptives affair neatly wrapped and proudly raised like a flag by fascist and fascistic rethoric, the most ferocious defenders of morality. Here the fact that rights means duties is not concealed but proudly defended; the same way that freedom of speech makes it a duty to express yourself through speech, the fascists make clear that having children is both a right and a duty, or better explained: it is a duty because it is a right.
We must express that “rights are duties” can be found in all manner of rights, or hasn’t any anarchist who has expressed their intention of not voting been attacked by the argument “our fathers fought for/ didn’t have this right”? Voting is a right, yes, but it’s also the duty of the good citizen, the prototypical politically-conscious (and therefore deactivated from critical thinking) national citizen that every government promotes and loves.
Some people say “no rights without duties, no duties without rights”. Now you know what it really means.
Fascist thought embraces reproductive rights as reproductive duties: it draws from the religious background that moral precepts usually originate from, promotes the “traditional” family (we know it has nothing traditional, for the family model used in most of human history revolves around collective parenting), and so on and so forth. When fascistic regimes break, dismiss or violate present reproductive rights (and human rights as a whole) we don’t see the liberation that would follow the emancipation from human rights but the institutionalization of other rights; rights that are human but not recognized as so, rights that belong to an already-gone era, like the right to form a “healthy, traditional family away from degeneration”. Present reproduction rights are just an evolution from the reproductive rights granted in past eras and now reclaimed by fascists, for no government truly wants to repress reproduction in the long run.
Why does the freedom to have children been nearly-always respected? Because of the role it has on the perpetuation of social orders and labour. Children are not made by the demand of the state, but through the freedom of the parents, although they are an expression of the family mode of every historical age. We must look at why do people have kids.
Why do people have kids? In the past certainly not from a desire to reproduce, leave a mark on the world, a inherently biological need, a universal passion inside of every human; that is a modern invention. Children have always been an extension of the parents’ power (or most notably the parent’s power, the father extending this relation to the mother too). It is common knowledge that the role of marriages (political marriages, as they call it now, as if there were non-political marriages) was to unite two families (in fact fathers) and their power, it is common knowledge how sons were sent to religious or military institutions to secure salvation, influence and favour… But must notably it is common knowledge the need for children to help alliviate the workload, to work the fields or to reproduce the knowledge of “skilled” labour. The world proletariat means those who produce children, and how significant is that! Currently children are property, and even the most “revolutionary” of governments defend this state of affairs. As property and as an extension of parental power they have been and are reduced to the category of working animals, of half-humans or not-fully-humans, and no amount of familiar love and affection can affect this structural fact.
There’s this Darwinian myth that animals partake in reproduction for the survival of the species. But is it true? Animal reproduction can have, in the animal sense, a lot more effects. What good does for a female animal (in most cases) to be feeble during a certain amount of time for pregnancy, and then to have to divert its attention to its children? It certainly does no good to the female half of the population, but to male half of the population it’s a great benefit, for they get to enjoy the pleasurable activites involving the freedom to move. It’s told that sexual division of labour is necessary in the animal kingdom, and this line of thought is transfered to the human kingdom through conservative propaganda. But it is much doubtful that an individual animal has a sense of duty towards the species and therefore must reproduce: it seems very likely that this feeling is a human creation, a substitute of God for the new revolutionary liberal governments of the XVIII and XIX centuries. We produly state it, then, that reproduction can be a repressive tool of one sex towards the other, a repression that comes before the parent-child repression.
The imposed belief that children are parent property (adult supremacy) has many effects on children. Children are seen as mindless drones, unintelligent animals that will run into a car the second you aren’t looking at them, beings of such limited intelligence that must pass through minimum 12 years of compulsory controlled environment where standarized knowledge is forced upon their minds. Children are permitted no agency until they’re 21 in some cases, all under the threat of physical and emotional violence… Good thing that having children is a right!
And this isn’t just the parents stuff; all this opression and coercion is state-enforced and law-sponsored. Because if one parental unit, in their magnanimous grace, decides that their children won’t go to school, that they can go around alone… they will be punished for failing their duty! Of course that having children is a right, of course, that’s why it’s a duty. And for children that decide to tear off this yoke, to try to be free and flee from the family there remains a cruel punishment: for going against the family’s interests and pursuing their own they are condemned to stay in a specially-designed prison, even worse than school.
Thank the heavens that having children is a right, a human right enforced by the armies of the United Nations! Because if one nation tries to destroy the product of centuries of “traditional family units” and “our natural impulse to make our species to survive” it is usually done so to impose a culture over another and to play into race theories, and in the end to impose another rights system over another population. Good thing we have our Human Rights Watch to defend our rights system! The United Nations Army, civilization’s tool to enforce the only civilizational system valid in the present to colonized nations around the world, we sing its praises!
And to supplement that right, the right to have children, we have the right to education. Education! It is a right so rightful that failing to comply may lead to punishment and prison. Schools and colleges and high schools and universities, standardization and specialization, the prussian school system made real. Children are currently an extension of parental power, private property, but we know that any legitimate property must have the consent of the State; that’s why the State may take your children if it doesn’t pass through the educational machine. The child is then put in a state of pressure, pushed from both the school and the family to be respectful to the school and to dedicate itself to the family the same way it respects the family and dedicates itself to the school. The dual, bicephalous purpose of these machines compliment each other, all defended by the state and its policing powers.
Is it any wonder that children don’t like this stress, this oppression they are put under? In every house the child revolts against its parents, a million petty acts and fights, until “they learn”. In every school children mock teachers and evade the education system in every way they can until the consequences and punishments are too big to continue the revolt. Don’t they have a right to revolt? Aren’t their concerns legitimate? They live their oppression in their skin, an oppression that every adult has felt and now imposes upon children.
“But they are children!! They don’t know!!” Of course they know! They know because they are children. Even if you have concerns that they don’t have, and in your adult mind they are nothing more than mindless drones to be educated and lifted to the status of human once they reach adulthood, they have a thinking mind too. I say, let them revolt! Let them fight for youth liberation, for a better education -or no education at all-. Taking children seriously – it’s not that radical of an idea.