A license to procreate?

Well, I worked for Los Angeles County's childrens protective service for about 5 years, and among those on the front line of that battle to protect children from the most horrific abuse you could imagine... abuse delivered by their own parents... that was the sentitment that came up quite often - that people shouldn't be allowed to have kids unless they meet certain minimum standards.

They weren't concerned about any theoretical overpopulation. They were reacting to seeing toddlers who were burned with cigarettes by crack whore mothers - burned for crying when they were hungry. The social workers pointed out that you had to have a license for your bicycle, a license to drive a car, a license to get married, but you could pop out kids as fast as you could get pregnant. (One case that was active at the time I was working there was a woman who had 19 kids over the years. She was mentally impaired, on crack, homeless and lived in the park. She liked sex, and when she could tell she was ready to deliver, she headed for the hospital, had and then abandoned the baby who because of the drug use was premature, addicted, and suffered from many physical defects, spent a month in the NeoNatal Intensive Care unit (that's about a $500,000) and then went into foster care at about $5,000/month for a special needs baby).

There are people on the religious right who argue for the rights of the unborn.  Well, the unborn don't have rights.  But if they did, it would be a right to be born to parents who met minimum standards. On an emotional level, my sympathies are all with the idea of licensing procreation, but the idea of the state administering this, and the fact that no amount of mental twisting and turning will justify this leaves me disatisfied.   No, the government has no justified power to tell anyone who can and cannot procreate.  But I would like to see those parent who violate the rights of their own kids treated with an appropriate harshness in hopes that (along with ending welfare) it would seriously diminish the amount of child abuse (over 70,000 cases a year in Los Angeles County where child protective services took custody back when I was there.)

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I'll have to disagree with Ed on this one.  

I think he would agree that parents don't have carte blanche to treat their children in whatever way they wish.  Their children are not literally their property; the children have a right to be treated well and raised in a way that will enable them to become self-supporting adults. An agency like Child Protective Services is a legitimate part of a government dedicated to the protection of people's rights -- in this case, the protection of the children's rights.  Parents who are unwilling or unable to properly raise their children should not be allowed to have custody of them.

In the same way, people who are unable to properly raise children should not be allowed to reproduce and parent them.  Forbidding irresponsible or incompetent people from reproducing does not violate their rights; it protects the rights of potential offspring against being brought into a world in which they become victims of neglect and abuse.

Bill,

It could be argued that since a "potential" child doesn't yet exist, he or she has no rights, in which case, dysfunctional parents would still have a right to bear children but no right to retain custody of them after they are born.

That's right. It is a timing thing. They have to have a child before they can be parents of any kind, much less dysfunctional parents.

The time when they have a right to have a child occurs before they've shown themselves to be dysfunctional as parents.

They are innocent of child abuse until after the child is born and then abused by them. Now, if a court were to rule that they should not have any further children because of how they abused their current child, that would be a different story.

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I believe that most of current child abuse would disappear (not all of it) if we just eliminated all government welfare programs. When people have to interact with others, and particularly to get paid for work done, they need to become more accountable - they attune themselves differently towards society and towards people outside of their immediate family and friends, they find themselves living up to a somewhat higher standard. Having to take care of one's self, be responsible for earning a living, takes one to a more adult place - a place that I can tell you very few of the child abusers I dealt with in a five year period had ever reached. Today's welfare society has encouraged whole subcultures to live out of malignant, angry child personalities - morally stunted.

I wrote, "It could be argued that since a "potential" child doesn't yet exist, he or she has no rights, in which case, dysfunctional parents would still have a right to bear children but no right to retain custody of them after they are born."

Steve replied, "That's right. It is a timing thing. They have to have a child before they can be parents of any kind, much less dysfunctional parents. The time when they have a right to have a child occurs before they've shown themselves to be dysfunctional as parents. They are innocent of child abuse until after the child is born and then abused by them. Now, if a court were to rule that they should not have any further children because of how they abused their current child, that would be a different story."

Steve, we shouldn't have to wait until blatantly dysfunctional people bear children before we step in.  If the prospective parents are retarded, drug addicted, mentally disturbed, or otherwise incompetent at taking care of children, it doesn't take a genius to see that they will not be fit parents.  We don't allow people who cannot pass a driver's test to drive a motor vehicle.  It isn't necessary or prudent to wait until they have an accident.  Shouldn't parenting have similar safeguards?

I could agree with Bill easily on the "drunk driver" theory.  We regard some actions so dangerous to others that no one is allowed to those freedoms, regardless that they carry them out without provable harm to others.  (Some radical libertarians disagree with that; and in their utopias, drunk driving would be permitted.  Injuring others would still be wrong.)  My counter-argument to Bill's thesis is Roland G. Fryer, Jr.  Abandoned and abused, he was not swept up when the people he was living with were arrested for their crack cocaine business because he was at the race track. He was 12 at the time.  The story is in Freakonomics.  

In Freakonomics,  Ted Kaczynski is offered as a counter-point to Freyer because Kaczynski grew up middle class and Catholic.  He was recognized as a prodigy.

Not in Freakonomics are other important facts about Kaczynski.  His life was never idyllic.  And at Harvard he was subjected to a brutalizing human factors experiment. His behavioral problems were apparent at the University of California Berkeley where he was the youngest faculty member ever hired.  However, the department would have excused his inability to stand in front of a classroom or talk to students in his office, and insisted that he had a promising career.  

My point here is that I believe that life's wrong turn came from that Harvard experiment which took a sensitive mind and disfigured it.  And it was a result of the best judgment of the time by the best minds of the time about what was good, acceptable, and appropriate to do to and for others.  And his psychological dysfunction was also brushed off by other bright people who routinely decided what was best for other people. That warning light flashes over Bill's proposal that "we" should act upon other people for their own good or for the good of others or even for our own good.  

I think that Steve and Bill are agreed with probably all of us here that in a laissez faire society many causative factors for child abuse would be minimized.  We all share that hope, though the works of Charles Dickens and the Horatio Alger stories must warn us that utopias do not exist.

Steve, for myself, I did not ignore your posts because they are unworthy, but only that I am tracking the problem differently.  And, online dialectic being what it is, there was not that much to disagree with, hence not that much incentive to comment back on thost points. In #10 you issued a challenge: "If you were a judge, who is a libertarian, and (for the sake of the discussion) is able to determine there are no existing precendents, what would you want to know?  What principles apply?  How would you rule?"  The principle of course is the right of the individual to be free from unjust harm.  (Being fined for a violation of the law would be just harm.)  

1. The 16-year old can sue for emancipation.  My brother and his wife did it when they were pregnant minors.  They were married 35  year or so before she passed away too young. Some marriages work out.  But they had good family support.  And part of that was getting a lawyer and going to a judge so that they could get married and live as adults.

1.b. On that point, I wanted to say earlier, in support of Bill's broad thesis that in the old days, immigrants had to prove that they were either self-supporting, or had a sponsor who would guarantee that they would not become a public charge.  So that is a precedent for requiring potential parents to also prove that neither they nor their children will become a public burden.  What happens when that fails is an unanswered question, as Bill noted: you end up forcing other people to take up a burden.  

2.  The famous case of Buck v. Bell in which Oliver Wendell Holmes said, "three generations of imbeciles are enough" was fraught with problems that have not been resolved.  Your case comes with unexamined premises.  The plaintiff is said to have the mentality of an 8-year old and has a legal guardian.  Each of those two conditions raises the bar.  But I must ask: how old is the plaintiff?  The difference between a 17-year old with a legal guardian and a 27-year old with a legal guardian is salient.

How is the "mental ability" measured and against what? A 10-year old with the mentality of an 8-year old has an IQ of 80; adults like that are commonplace. They may be "dull" but they are functionally competent.  Deeper is the nature of the testing instrument: a multiple guess bubble sheet, or an interview with a psychologist? 

So, to answer the question: Not enough information is present.  As stated in plain language, the plaintiff should not be allowed to break the guardianship. They already are in a legally-recognized condition of minimized rights.  However, we need to know more about the petitioner.

3.  The present system has no way to prevent more children.  Perhaps I do not know enough law.  However, it occured to me thinking about this earlier this afternoon, that a felon who was convicted of armed robbery would have a hard time getting a gun permit,  even after having served all sentencing, parole, etc. etc.,  and even in a "shall issue" state, so maybe someone might be able to show "standing" in court and ask for sterlization of the man. He might be allowed to own a gun, but not have children.  But again, who has standing to petition the court for an involuntary sterlization of this man?

Do you have better answers?

The topic is transhumanism.  These challenges over government licenses and court orders on behalf of or opposed to pregnant(able) people foreshadow the problems in genetic engineering in particular and bio-engineering in general.  If game rules do not allow athletes to eat certain foods now, what will be the reaction to one who designs and grows another or two pairs of muscles?  Or more efficient hemoglobin? Or eyes that focus from 10x telescopic to 10x microscopic from IR to UV? Ever wonder what dogs hear or smell?  

Remember that Ed Hudgins wrote in opposition to Leon Richard Kass, the Bush science advisor who is opposed to all of this.  And he is not alone.  Not just on the conservative right, of course, are all those progressives opposed to anything "unnatural" like genetically modified foods. They will be the same people who want to prevent "the rich" from enjoying enhancements and improvements not available to everyone.  Some could claim consistent with their logic that no one should be allowed such modifications. It is not just conservatives who have a death ethos.

Some years ago, I was in a courtroom where the judge wore hearing aids. I believe that he put them on before entering and did not need them in daily life.  We here can appreciate the logic that links clothing and eyeglasses to microrobots that clean the plaque from your arteries.  Maybe a billion people share that perception. Maybe. 

I don't know that my answers are any better.  I like to examine things like these as exercises in understanding the interface of rights and the law and human action (in the context of psychology and culture).

1. The 16 year old, by law in our country, hasn't quite reached majority, but might be mature enough to be emancipated. Family courts work on the 'principle' of what is best for the child, but that needs to be examined in regards to individual rights. There isn't enough information in this example because we don't know if the parents have been responsible guardians, or if the child is mature enough to be emancipated. The examination of the facts would call for a focus on the intellectual and emotional maturity, and the practical means to exercise those rights that are currently constrained as a minor. The examination also has to be in the context of the family and the parent's maturity in the exercise of their duties.

We don't read much in the Objectivist literature on this issue of the rights of the child and the rights of the guardian.

The court also has a third option which is the court appointment of a guardian ad litem for a specificed period of time. This would be a way to avoid the full emancipation, but still inject a higher level of maturity into the parenting arrangement. It is usually used to give the court a way to continue to protect the child while not taking away parental rights. I don't think it would help with the issue of a child wanting to have a child, and usually it can only be used where there is a voluntary agreement to accept that for a period of time, or where a child abuse conviction obtains.

2. I wasn't clear on the person with the age of an 8 year old. I was thinking of a woman who was in her late twenties or thirties but not capable of looking out for herself. So this issue is that the parents as legal guardians want to have their developmentally disabled child, who is now physically an adult, sterilized. The child objects. What does the court say? With those facts at hand I think the court would be right to let the parents sterilize the child because they aren't willing to raise a grandchild but are willing to continue caring for their daughter and the daughter isn't capable of supporting herself much less a child of her own.

3. Sexually abusing a child is a clear case of voluntarily violating the rights of another. In the example he is a repeat offender - just to make it clearer. The person has voluntarily stepped away from some of their own rights - but to what degree? If there were a technology for doing a 'selective neutering' of the offender so that it only left him totally uninterested in sex with children, it would be easy to say that is the proper course and then he could have children of his own without risk of molesting them. But we don't have such a technology. I'd say that a person that sexually molests children has given up enough rights by that act to be treated by the court in whatever mechanism is the least punitive but will still be effective - I think the court should order sterilization (which answers the question posed, but not the issue of child abuse, which with pedophiles might not be stopped by sterilization.)
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Side note:  Marotta, you continue to address "conservatives" as if that term indicates the same ideology. It doesn't any more. There are now a significant number of constitutional conservatives that are not of the religious right, a significant number of fiscal conservatives that are not of the religious right, and a growing number of libertarian conservatives that are not of the religious right.

In the American political structure it's nearly impossible for a third party to do more that exercise minimal influence from the sidelines. Therefore it behooves us to encourage the transforation of the old conservative monolith within the GOP into this variety of conservatives, because while they are standing out separately, we can encourage constitutionality, fiscal reform, movement towards smaller government and libertarian leanings, while actively discouraging religious positions in politics. (It is also a good thing to encourage Democrats to abandon those among them who are progressives and to see the values of small government, but I don't see that working. Human nature suggests that Democrats won't change their views while they see themselves 'winning' or until we have so reformed the educational system that a new generation won't join the democrats.)

To treat all conservatives alike, and with a negative connotation is to poison the ground most likely to yield growth in the direction we want.

Bill,

It is the individual rights of the children that are at issue here.

But the question is should a person be prohibited from having children.  If the children aren't yet born, then it is NOT their individual rights that are at issue.  You are advocating the protection of the rights of children who have not yet been born and doing so by advocating that their would-be parents not be allowed to have them!  I think that's going to be a tough argument to stand by :-)
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In your nanny example, the children already exist, therefore they have individual rights to be protected.  If someone hired her to watch over imaginary children, or hired her for kids that won't be born for a few years, it would not be a violation of anyone's rights.
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...the government is justified in prohibiting incompetent, irresponsible people from bearing children and caring for them.

My point is that a person is innocent till they move towards violating someones rights.  If the person has been convicted in the past of crimes that show them to be incompetent and irresponsible to a criminal degree in ways that directly bear on child rearing... yes, prohibit them from having kids. But otherwise, no. The government has no moral justification from interfering with anyone unless it is due to the violation of someone's rights. There must be evidence, due process and a judicial ruling.

Bill,

I'm advocating the protection of children whose rights will be violated if they are allowed to be born. The only way to prevent their rights from being violated once they are born and in the custody of such parents is to prevent the children from being born in the first place.

There are two problems with that.

First is that it is a claim that some, as yet unborn children's rights are the justification for an act. If the child hasn't been born yet then there it doesn't yet have a right.  If this not-right has not yet been violated by an act that has not yet been committed, it can not be the justification the state uses to take away a liberty.

The second problem with that statement is the implication that it helps the children (which is the purpose of protecting their rights) to not let them be born. I'm sorry, Bill, but that just doesn't make sense to me.

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In your example of the terrorist building a bomb, his acts are a threat to existing people - people already born.

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The only way that government acquires a moral basis for acting to protect another person where they must use force, is via our right to defend ourselves. I have the right to defend myself, using force, not just when attacked, but when presented with a creditable threat of imminent violence. The obvious purpose of the self-defence is to protect my life. Preventing the birth of a child does not protect its life. Also, the law wisely requires that the threat be imminent and specific before I exercise force to defend against it. Neither of those apply when the threat of child abuse is so far in the future it can't be seen and the child doesn't even exist and the acts of child abuse are only in the imagination.

My approach to this is that each of us begins with the right to reproduce. But that right can be lost if we violate the rights of another. This is a simple logical requirement in the nature of rights, as there can be no such thing as a right to violate a right. The issue then for a just government is to determine the objective law that will specify those criminal acts that permit prohibiting reproduction. In other words, "If a person shall do X, then they shall have forfit the right to reproduce."

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"You [Steve] say that if a person has been convicted of past crimes that show him to be incompetent and irresponsible in a way that bears on child rearing, it is all right to prohibit him from having kids. But you've already argued that if the kids haven't been born, they can have no rights that deserve to be protected, since they don't yet exist to possess them."

I'm not contradicting myself because I'm saying the government has the right to deny the person reproductive activities because the person was convicted of crimes related to children. It is the accused who is to have their liberty restricted upon conviction, and it is because they violated a right of a living person, an actual right. For example, when we put someone in jail part of the reason for doing so is to protect us from them, but its justification comes from the government acting against someone who forfited their rights to full liberty by a specific act that violated the right of another (they initiated force, threat to initiate force, fraud or theft).

We both agree that there are people who should not be allowed to have children. We both agree that it must be from an objective analysis of that person's acts that we arrive at that conclusion. We both agree that individual rights is the crux of analysis as to what a government should or should not be morally able to do. But we disagree on this issue of individual rights of the unborn.