by Patrick Appel
[D]o people really have children based on an abstract obligation? When people do have children out of obligation, it’s not generally abstract – it’s concrete. I’ll have this kid to please my mother, or my husband, or to win the battle of the womb with the Zionist enemy. Those don’t sound like the kinds of motives that Douthat is aiming for.
And when people undertake to live their lives based on an abstract principle, there’s generally (in my experience) a concrete motive underneath. And, of course, the same thing is true on the other side of the ledger. I refuse to believe that there is a single human being who has refused to have children because of some abstract argument about the environment or some such. There’s bound to be a much more concrete reason, with "the environment" serving as a useful piece of intellectual justification.
The Dish 