Is having children a moral duty?
Moral Maze
BBC
4.5 • 609 Ratings
🗓️ 12 June 2025
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
There’s been a fair amount of focus on the concept of pronatalism recently and debate over whether it is left or right wing for governments to introduce policies that encourage women to have more babies. Others argue that the matter is too big to be consumed by the culture wars.
This week, the United Nations Population Fund issued its strongest statement yet on fertility decline, warning that hundreds of millions of people are not able to have the number of children they want, citing the prohibitive cost of parenthood and the lack of a suitable partner as some of the reasons affecting birth rates across the world.
For a country in the developed world to increase or maintain its population, it needs a birth rate of 2.1 children per woman on average. Last year in the UK, it fell to 1.4. Like many developed nations, women are having fewer babies, which poses economic problems as countries face the impact of both aging and declining populations, and a smaller workforce in relation to the number of pensioners.
Why are people in richer nations choosing to have fewer babies? Has parenthood had a bad press? Is it too expensive to have kids or do people just wait too long to tick off life goals before they realise their fertility window has closed?
And is it manipulative for governments to encourage women to have more children? For some, a low birth rate is the sign of a civilised society where women have reproductive autonomy. Is there a moral duty to have children?
PRESENTER Michael Buerk PANELLISTS Ash Sarkar, Giles Fraser, Mona Siddiqui, James Orr GUESTS Caroline Farrow, Prof Anna Rotkirch, Prof Lisa Schipper, Sarah Ditum PRODUCER Catherine Murray ASSISTANT PRODUCER Peter Everett EDITOR Tim Pemberton
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:04.8 | Good evening, babies are a dying breed, or at least they've gone out of fashion across much of the globe. |
| 0:10.9 | Births in two-thirds of the world's countries have now fallen below the replacement rate. |
| 0:16.2 | Half as many 30-year-old women here have children than did their grandmothers at that age. |
| 0:22.0 | In Japan, they've been selling more incontinence pads for the elderly than baby's nappies for a decade now. |
| 0:28.6 | South Korea, whose birth rate is a third of replacement level, will lose half its population by the end of the century. |
| 0:35.9 | Why? A UN report this week reckons people still want children but are worried about money or the |
| 0:41.9 | future. Others point to a correlation with female education and autonomy. Given a choice, |
| 0:48.1 | women seem to prefer fewer children or no babies at all. The consequences with fewer and |
| 0:53.4 | fewer productive young people, supporting |
| 0:55.4 | more and more unproductive elderly, could be dire. It's not clear what any government can do about it. |
| 1:02.1 | And while numbers fall in the developed world, in many of the poorest countries, they continue |
| 1:06.3 | to soar. The population of Africa is set to triple this century, intensifying the pressure to migrate. |
| 1:13.3 | There's a fertility crisis, the UN says, that raises many issues, but one basic moral question. |
| 1:20.1 | Is having a family a lifestyle choice or a human obligation? |
| 1:24.8 | Is there a moral duty to have babies? |
| 1:29.9 | That's our moral maze tonight. The panel, |
| 1:33.9 | Mona Siddiqui, Professor of Islamic and Interreligious Studies at Edinburgh University, |
| 1:40.9 | Ash Saka from the Novara Media Group, James Orr, Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge University, and the priest and polemicist, Giles Fraser. |
| 1:45.1 | Jiles, you've got five children, I think, but then you're old, aren't you? |
| 1:48.6 | So you're a 20th century generation. |
| 1:50.8 | You're a charmer, you are. |
... |
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