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Am I too poor to have a baby?

How society convinced us that childbearing is morally wrong without a fat budget.

Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form. Here’s this week’s question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity:

The last few years have been financially hard for our family. My husband and I are both working and building up a business. It’s been slow and the financial damages are going to take a while to recoup. We are relying on government assistance to help support our family of six.

Crazy as it sounds to most people, we’d like to have another child before it’s too late as I’m already in the upper ranges of my childbearing years. I keep feeling like it’s irresponsible to have another child because we are on government assistance, even though we have a roof over our heads, everyone is healthy, and there’s food on the table. We have a wonderful support system and we spend time with each child individually.

I’m worried, though, what friends and family might think of us if we have another. Is it unreasonable or morally wrong to bring another child into the world when we are poor? I know people who think it’s wrong to have more kids if you can’t fully fund college 529s for those you have, but that seems a bit extreme. So where do we draw the line morally?

Dear Love-Rich-and-Cash-Strapped,

The idea that we need to save up a certain amount of money before we have kids is really common. On the surface, it might seem reasonable, because we all want to do right by our kids. But once we buy the premise that we need to clear some financial bar, we’re left with a very tricky question: Exactly how much money is enough?

Some people might answer: If you’re on welfare, then you don’t have enough. But notice what that claim amounts to. It’s a claim that accepting public assistance means you automatically forfeit your right to reproductive choice.

That’s a terrible claim, and I think we should reject it!

Think about it: If our moral principle is “you need X dollars to responsibly reproduce,” then we’re committed to saying that most of humanity, across most of history and most of the present-day world, has been acting immorally by having families. Enslaved people, colonized people, people in poverty today — all “immoral,” just for responding to one of nature’s strongest biological drives? Absurd.

So how did we get to this absurd idea? How did society condition us to think that we should only be allowed to reproduce if we clear a certain financial bar?

Have a........

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