This argument bothers me because it seems to devalue human life on a very fundamental level. If your children resent you for “forcing them into this world”—if they would have preferred to have never been born in the first place—that’s not a healthy or normal reaction, but rather, near-suicidal depression. Sure, some people are suicidally depressive, but that’s a very dark attitude to project onto one’s hypothetical children as a default assumption.
If your kids aren’t suicidally depressive but also don’t love you enough to take care of you in your old age, there’s probably something else they resent you for other than being born in the first place. Which isn’t necessarily your fault—some people are just irrationally resentful. But that is probably the bigger risk to worry about. It’s just that, compared to trusting nursing homes not to become abusive, it’s still a better bet.
It’s also not necessarily about obligation, at least not in the negative sense of the term. I took care of my father during the last year of his life, not out of obligation but out of love. (One might define love as the act of willingly accepting the obligation to care for another, but a willingly accepted obligation is not really the same kind of obligation.)
In any case, the goal is to go into old age having people in your life who are capable of taking care of you and who will choose to do so out of love. Having kids and maintaining a strong relationship with them gives you a good chance of reaching that goal. Institutions, on the other hand, will never love you and will instead just fuck you up with psychoactive drugs for their own convenience.
> if they would have preferred to have never been born in the first place—that’s not a healthy or normal reaction, but rather, near-suicidal depression
This is a common misconception, and completely incorrect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinatalism . This is a possible valid philosophical judgment that implies nothing about depression.
No, it’s a cognitive distortion associated with depression that some people have rationalized into a philosophical judgment, because it’s easier for some people to do that than to actually address the level of depression and misanthropy that they suffer from.
