Should poor people have kids?

[Rev. Rye]

But I'm not sure it's preventable.

I think your Irishness is starting to show, Boru. Birth control is an option, and if it isn't, there's something horribly wrong with your society. Not you, of course, unless you're one of the fuckers making laws keeping them out of reach.

In all seriousness, as an antinatalist, I don't particularly trust the goodness of procreation, and there's times where I had the idea of "licensed parenthood." You want to raise your kids, you need a license proving you're fit to take care of them (if you have children without a license, no harm, no foul, it just goes into the adoption system), and I think it'd need to be at least harder than the driver's license exam. After all, if you fuck up while driving, you probably kill people, and eventually, as the last people affected by it die off, it ceases to matter. You fuck up as a parent, if your kids don't take the initiative to unfuck themselves before you have grandkids, that shit reverberates across generations. I'm a big fan of Last Podcast on the Left, and many of their true crime episodes showcase how the effects of a horrible upbringing can lead to complete motherfucking disaster (e.g. Fred and Rosemary West, Ed Gein, David Berg of the Children of God, Robert Pickton, Richard Kuklinski, and Joseph Kallinger's upbringing really takes the cake); and yes, I know most cases just lead to the kids being fucked up in a more mundane way (see Christopher Titus), but that doesn't quite detract from my point. And as anyone who's been following the Ethan Crouch affluenza case knows, rich parents can fuck up too, just in very different ways having less to do with their basic Maslovian needs.

I heard somewhere (full disclosure, it was Dennis Miller, back when he was funny and not a right-wing shill) parenting's probably one of the hardest jobs to do, but the easiest job to get; you fuck up once and it's yours for life. Sadly, this plan is almost guaranteed to never be put into practice.