Am I too poor to have a baby?

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?

Understanding the history of this idea is useful. In the 1800s, England’s Poor Law sought to offer relief to people in poverty — but along the way, it codified a distinction between the “deserving poor” and the “undeserving poor.” If you were disabled, elderly, or ill, you were considered deserving of relief. But if you were able-bodied and viewed as idle, then you were blamed for your own bad fortune, and you could be sent to a workhouse or a prison.

Around the same time, the economist Thomas Malthus was arguing that poor relief should be abolished altogether. It was counterproductive, he said, because it incentivized people to keep having children even if they couldn’t independently support them. He cast people in poverty as irresponsible agents making bad reproductive calculations. His solution? Don’t get married and have sex unless you can afford kids.

With the introduction of the modern welfare state in the 20th century, some of these ideas slipped into the background, but they never really disappeared. The conflation of economic dependency with moral weakness persists in the public imagination. So does the notion that we should hold individuals responsible for their poverty — and restrict their reproductive freedom accordingly — instead of placing the blame on structural failures.

I think bearing this history in mind can be helpful for you, because it’ll remind you that if somebody implies it’s irresponsible to have more kids unless you can fully support them independently, that person is not stating some timeless moral truth. In fact, it’s just the opposite.

For most of human history, the idea of a nuclear family that must be economically self-sufficient before it can morally reproduce would have been straight-up unintelligible. Traditions ranging from Confucian thought to Indigenous ethical systems to Catholic social teaching have insisted that the community has obligations to support families in need. You don’t “earn” the right to have children by first proving your self-sufficiency to your community. That’s a deep misunderstanding of what communities are for. Instead, relying on support from those around you is just a normal feature of human life.

Framing reproductive freedom as a privilege you have to earn shifts moral responsibility entirely onto individual families while ignoring the structures that determine why some families are poor in the first place — like health care costs, housing markets, and in your case, the precarity of entrepreneurship. It asks “Can you afford a child?” without bothering to ask “Why does raising a kid cost this much?” or “Why is a hardworking family’s labor not compensated enough to support their household?”

I’d argue the obligation to ensure a child’s well-being is primarily an obligation on society — particularly now that we live in an era of such wealth that everyone’s needs could be met if we redistributed money more equitably.

To the extent that some duty lies on the shoulders of the child’s parents, I think it’s a duty of care. As Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman write in their book What Are Children For?:

Money can buy many things, but the ethical justification to have children ought not be one of them… It is rather the other way around: in having a child, a human being assumes the responsibility to care for them, to the best of their abilities, whatever the challenges they will have to face. Parents who do so under circumstances of near-certain hardship, where that duty of care will likely exact more suffering and require more sacrifice, are not more morally blameworthy than their well-to-do peers; they might just be braver.

And when it comes to care, you seem abundantly able to fulfill your duty. Although your family might not be rich in terms of cash, you’re rich in love, attention, and social support, all of which have massively important effects on a child’s well-being. You and your partner are clearly also hardworking and courageous, which means you’ll be modeling key virtues for your kids — one of the greatest gifts any parent can give their children.

Can you guarantee that your kids will have everything they ever want in life? No. But the truth is, no parent can. Not today, probably not in the future, and certainly not in the past. Historically, virtually no one could be certain that they’d manage to give their kids a good life in the contemporary sense. Infant and childhood mortality were extremely high, famine was common, war was endemic — and guess what? People had kids anyway. Not because they were irresponsible, but because they understood children as participants in a shared, uncertain human endeavor.

One thing that has kept people having kids even in the face of all the difficulty and uncertainty is the idea that we can never quite see what’s around the bend. There’s hope in that.

The Jewish tradition illustrates this with a wonderful story: When the ancient Israelites were enslaved in Egypt, the Israelite men didn’t want to sleep with their wives because they didn’t want to bring kids into the world only to see them become slaves to the Pharaoh. But the women disagreed with this logic. They believed that, so long as they didn’t foreclose the possibility of a future for their people, things would get better and someone would save them. So they got gussied up and seduced their husbands. And lo and behold, nine months later, Moses was born — and he ended up freeing the Israelites from slavery.

The point is that we don’t need to clear some bar of guaranteed, independent material wealth before we bring kids into the world. The future is uncertain, but if we let that stop us from having children, we foreclose the possibility of a new life — a life that just might make the future brighter and more beautiful for everyone.

Bonus: What I’m reading