I have been researching and teaching about moral issues for more than a decade. How people procreate and how often they procreate has a huge impact on both the children born and others who interact with them. Yet even in academic philosophy – a discipline that often questions the appropriateness of ordinary behavior – the moral scrutiny of having children has been lacking. As I observed the population continue to rise and the circumstances of future people become more precarious, I thought the ethics of procreation needed deeper investigation. I hope my recent work on this topic will help others think more carefully about the moral complexities of having and raising children.
This collection of 11 essays, all written by different authors, surveys the most salient issues in the ethics of procreation.
I view the scope of this volume as its greatest asset: topics covered include (among others) the environmental case against procreation, arguments for antinatalism, the rationality of deciding to have children, the morality of adoption, and the scope of parental responsibility.
I consider this collection the ideal starting point for someone who, as I once did, wants a snapshot of the most foundational issues in procreative ethics.
This volume contributes to the growing literature on the morality of procreation and parenting. About half of the chapters take up questions about the morality of bringing children into existence. They discuss the following questions: Is it wrong to create human life? Is there a connection between the problem of evil and the morality of procreation? Could there be a duty to procreate? How do the environmental harms imposed by procreation affect its moral status? Given these costs, is the value of establishing genetic ties ever significant enough to render procreation morally permissible? And how should government respond to peoples'…
Although I have never been faced with an unwanted pregnancy, I lived through an era when women did not have easy choices available to them. Abortions were illegal while there was also tremendous stigma attached to those who choose to give their babies up for adoption or even decided to raise their babies without a male involved. Many times, the family of origin refused to support these women, turning their back on them. Most often, the men were not held accountable and disappeared with no further responsibilities.
This is a story of friendships between four women who are from outside appearances very different. Over the course of the book, one passes away from natural causes from old age while two fall in love. One of the ladies who falls in love decides to get pregnant without telling the other. Complications ensue and the friendships are challenged.
Jesi's obsession with a woman she doesn't know takes over her life. She alienates everyone she loves until realizing that if she didn't make a change she would lose them all forever. Her solution is found after a couple glasses of Jack Daniels and her decision will change the lives of all of them, Jesi, Nicole, Rachael, Jules, George, and the woman of her obsession, The Weed Lady. In genuine Jesi style, she takes them all on a journey that is fully energized leaving never a dull moment as her every move sometimes surprises even herself.
When offered a plot at the community garden, I thought it would be fun to invite other families to learn to grow food together. As a science teacher, I knew that for toddlers, digging in the dirt and growing plants for food could plant seeds for a life-long love of exploring nature, hands-on science inquiry, environmental stewardship, and joy in healthy eating. As we gardened, I noticed what questions children and their parents had, and how we found the answers together. I wrote the picture book How to Say Hello to A Worm: A First Guide to Outside to inspire more kids and their parents to get their hands dirty.
What Will Grow? makes a game out of observing and guessing the identities of seeds and sprouting plants: preschoolers get to guess based on observing picture clues and hearing rhyming riddles before lifting the flaps to reveal each answer. This book builds connections between the stage of garden plants' development and also provides practice in building science skills.
From the team behind the gorgeous What Will Hatch? comes a companion book all about seeds and the plants that grow from them--and featuring four pull-out gatefolds.
Seeds can be big or small, round or pointy, and all sorts of colors. They can become flowers, trees, fruits, or vegetables, and they sprout all times of year, during spring, summer, fall, and winter.
But all seeds have one thing in common--inside each is a new plant life waiting to emerge. What kind of plant will bloom? Wait and see what will grow!
I am a writer who lived in Germany for more than six years with my family. That experience opened my eyes to a different way of parenting in a country that had learned hard lessons about too much authoritarian control. It also taught me that much of what we believe is “true” about raising kids is actually cultural—and therefore, can be changed. In addition to my book about raising kids in Germany, Achtung Baby, I’ve written extensively on raising self-reliant kids, including articles in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Time.com among others.
When my daughter was in first grade in Germany, her teacher read this book to her entire class. Sex education is considered a right in Germany since knowing how your body works is essential for your reproductive health. In the U.S. it’s left to us as parents to teach sex ed to our kids—which I’d argue is less than ideal, given the high costs of keeping kids ignorant. (The U.S. has higher rates of teen AIDS, teen pregnancy, and abortion than Germany.) If you don’t know how to broach this subject, this book is a good, age-appropriate, place to start when your young kids first begin asking questions.
Like most children, I adored baby animals from an early age. I bonded deeply with a pet kitten; I campaigned (unsuccessfully but perennially) for a puppy; I delighted in caterpillars. In college, my biology classes introduced me to a profusion of marine larval forms, and a fascination with the true diversity of animal babies fully gripped me. I eventually earned a PhD in the biology of squid babies and, shortly afterward, produced two human babies of my own. I now live with my human family, a cat, and a garden full of grubs, caterpillars, maggots, and innumerable other babies. I read and write about science and nature, especially the intersection of the weird and the adorable.
Similar to Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice, this book made me laugh and gasp at scandalous true stories of reproductive biology. What really captured my attention, though, were the unexpected ways that human actions are affecting the courtship, mating, and spawning of animals that might seem beyond our reach.
Knowing that we can unintentionally inhibit the intimate lives of other species through pollution and climate change really brings home the importance of reforming our behavior.
Forget the Kama Sutra. When it comes to inventive sex acts, just look to the sea. There we find the elaborate mating rituals of armored lobsters; giant right whales engaging in a lively threesome whilst holding their breath; full moon sex parties of groupers and daily mating blitzes by blueheaded wrasse. Deep-sea squid perform inverted 69s, while hermaphrodite sea slugs link up in giant sex loops. From doubly endowed sharks to the maze-like vaginas of some whales, Sex in the Sea is a journey unlike any other to explore the staggering ways life begets life beneath the waves. Beyond a…
This book
did my heart so good. It is one of my first reverse harem books, and I haven’t
stopped reading them since.
Part of the book deals with reproduction issues in
the wolf hierarchy, and as someone who studied reproduction in college, I was in
love with this element in the book.
The strong female lead and wonderful and sexy men didn’t hurt either. LOL
I am a scientist and biologist. Learning about evolution changed my life and put me on a path to studying it as a career. As a child, I was a voracious reader, and as an undergraduate, I read every popular science book on biology I could get my hands on. In retrospect, those books were almost as important to my education as anything I learned in a lab or lecture theatre. When writing for a general audience, I try to convey the same sense of wonder and enthusiasm for science that drives me to this day.
After 25 years as a professional biologist(!), it’s seldom that I come across a book about biology that blows my mind, but this book absolutely did. Both scientists and laymen are mostly interested in the flashy parts of male-male competition and female choice that we can readily observe, but the parts of it that go on “behind the scenes”—that is to say, inside the female reproductive tract—are even more fascinating.
I read this book only relatively recently since I thought I was already pretty well informed about the ins and outs of sperm competition. I was wrong. Sperm competition is even crazier than I had imagined, and Birkhead writes about it brilliantly.
Males are promiscuous and ferociously competitive. Females--both human and of other species--are naturally monogamous. That at least is what the study of sexual behavior after Darwin assumed, perhaps because it was written by men. Only in recent years has this version of events been challenged. Females, it has become clear, are remarkably promiscuous and have evolved an astonishing array of strategies, employed both before and after copulation, to determine exactly who will father their offspring.
Tim Birkhead reveals a wonderful world in which males and females vie with each other as they strive to maximize their reproductive success. Both sexes…
I have been researching and teaching about moral issues for more than a decade. How people procreate and how often they procreate has a huge impact on both the children born and others who interact with them. Yet even in academic philosophy – a discipline that often questions the appropriateness of ordinary behavior – the moral scrutiny of having children has been lacking. As I observed the population continue to rise and the circumstances of future people become more precarious, I thought the ethics of procreation needed deeper investigation. I hope my recent work on this topic will help others think more carefully about the moral complexities of having and raising children.
In this book, David Benatar defends a strong version of antinatalism – the view that it is morally wrong to procreate – and David Wasserman attempts to defend the moral permissibility of procreation.
Like most people, I originally found antinatalism deeply counterintuitive when I first encountered it, but some of Benatar’s arguments are hard to refute. I consider many of Wasserman’s responses reasonable, but as his exchange with Benatar progresses, the caveats and limits on permissible procreation become harder to ignore.
Even if antinatalism is false, this debate left me with the impression that the moral standards for procreation are much stricter than most believe.
While procreation is ubiquitous, attention to the ethical issues involved in creating children is relatively rare. In Debating Procreation, David Benatar and David Wasserman take opposing views on this important question. David Benatar argues for the anti-natalist view that it is always wrong to bring new people into existence. He argues that coming into existence is always a serious harm and that even if it were not always so, the risk of serious harm is sufficiently great to make procreation wrong. In addition to these "philanthropic" arguments, he advances the "misanthropic" one that because humans are so defective and cause…
I have spent my career studying the evolution of female biology. My PhD thesis was on the evolution of pregnancy and menstruation. I am currently a researcher at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging studying the evolution of menopause. I also inhabit a female body and have a personal interest in understanding how and why my own body works the way it does. As a lifelong teacher who has taught high school, college, and graduate students, I am passionate about sharing what I know with other women. I hope you enjoy these fascinating books about the female body and its amazing evolutionary history.
Ancient Bodies, Modern Lives is an academic but accessible book about how our evolutionary history has shaped women’s health.
Trevathan tackles issues that are relevant and important to women, such as early puberty in girls, breast cancer, the difficulties encountered during pregnancy and childbirth, and the symptoms experienced during the menopause transition.
Her thesis—which has shaped much of my own work and writing—is that many of the health challenges women face today are the result of a mismatch between our ancient bodies and modern lifestyles. Trevathan helps readers understand what these mismatches are and suggests lifestyle changes that can improve our health and well-being.
How has bipedalism impacted human childbirth? Do PMS and postpartum depression have specific, maybe even beneficial, functions? These are only two of the many questions that specialists in evolutionary medicine seek to answer, and that anthropologist Wenda Trevathan addresses in Ancient Bodies, Modern Lives.
Exploring a range of women's health issues that may be viewed through an evolutionary lens, specifically focusing on reproduction, Trevathan delves into issues such as the medical consequences of early puberty in girls, the impact of migration, culture change, and poverty on reproductive health, and how fetal growth retardation affects health in later life. Hypothesizing that…
I have been researching and teaching about moral issues for more than a decade. How people procreate and how often they procreate has a huge impact on both the children born and others who interact with them. Yet even in academic philosophy – a discipline that often questions the appropriateness of ordinary behavior – the moral scrutiny of having children has been lacking. As I observed the population continue to rise and the circumstances of future people become more precarious, I thought the ethics of procreation needed deeper investigation. I hope my recent work on this topic will help others think more carefully about the moral complexities of having and raising children.
Rivka Weinberg’s theory of when procreation is permissible and why is one of the most well-defended accounts of reproductive ethics.
The subtitle alludes to the book’s unique approach – the idea that procreation should be an exercise in risk management. All children face the risk of serious harm, so we should only procreate when we are able to do an awful lot to mitigate that risk.
What struck me most about Weinberg’s approach was its theoretical rigor and systematicity. Her account of the ethics of procreation is more thorough and cohesive than other work on the subject I have encountered, and her conclusions, while not being as stark as an antinatalist outlook, are nevertheless provocative.
Having children is probably as old as the first successful organism. It is often done thoughtlessly. This book is an argument for giving procreating some serious thought, and a theory of how, when, and why procreation may be permissible. procreative ethics, procreation itself is often done Rivka Weinberg begins with an analysis of the kind of act procreativity is and why we might be justifiably motivated to engage in it. She then proceeds to argue that, by virtue of our ownership and control of the hazardous material that is our gametes, we are parentally responsible for the risks we take…
