That question is incoherent.
Here's what I consider to be a simpler question to answer: do you think people have the right to give birth to a child whose existence would be only horrible, endless suffering before eventually succumbing to death?
This isn't just a hypothetical: people tend to agree that a parents who are at high chance of birthing a child with a terrible genetic disease probably shouldn't take that risk (or, at least, should protect against it with some preimplantation genetic testing).
But everyone suffers at least a little bit at some point in their life. If you don't think people have a right to birth children whose lives would be pure suffering, but you do think people have a right to birth children who would suffer at least a little bit in their lives, then how do you justify one but not the other? Is there some threshold amount of misery which you think is okay to inflict on someone without their consent?
There may be some other moral framework or argument which articulately justifies this, and I'm genuinely curious to see if someone has come up with an interesting answer to the question.
Unless you've worked out how to obtain consent from someone that doesn't exist either we create kids without their consent or society ends.
Do you consider the continuation of our society to be more important than respecting consent?
Is this satire?
Since an infant or fetus is unable to provide consent, why would you think a parent is incapable of doing so?
This is a baffling line of thought to me.
Our options are to keep creating support programs to cover for bad parenting (not nearly as effective as good parents) or to stop “bad” parents from having kids (not super moral).
Horse crap, a huge amount of parents genuinely believe violence is a necessity for child rearing (including frequent repetitions of "spare the rod, spoil the child") to the point that they've even pushed to bring it back into public schools!
Even the very basics are not accepted as fact by many.
The effects of corporal punishment are small compared to the effects of molestation and physical abuse. If corporal punishment were our only "issue", we'd be much better off. I wouldn't even classify this under "the very basics".
Corporal punishment is physical and psychological abuse. It is in the title: punishment is a judgement and corporal is the violence.
There is no such thing as corporal punishment that is also not an abuse. Maybe there is a scale of it but it is abuse.
Are you suggesting that judging your child's actions as wrong is psychological abuse?
> There is no such thing as corporal punishment that is also not an abuse.
That's incorrect, and the legal precedent has been clear on the legality of spanking and the distinction from abuse:
https://www.childwelfare.gov/topics/can/defining/disc-abuse/
Nobody said that. We are saying that corporal punishment is physical abuse.
> the legal precedent has been clear on the legality of spanking and the distinction from abuse
An action does not need to be illegal in all areas (or illegal at all) to be a form of abuse. Corporal punishment causes negative emotional, behavioral, and academic outcomes in children regardless of whether it is used in an area where it is legal or illegal. It is physical abuse and a poor method of parenting that is detrimental to the children's long-term welfare.
> Lifetime spanking/slapping was independently associated with increased odds of mental health disorders, physical health conditions, and defiant behaviors in adolescence after adjusting for childhood adversities and child maltreatment (unadjusted and adjusted odds ratios ranging from 1.29 to 2.19).
> These findings suggest that lifetime spanking/slapping is uniquely associated with harmful mental, physical, and behavioral outcomes in adolescence, and efforts should focus on its prevention.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07067437211000...
No, it's saying that infrequent lead exposure is not as harmful as most think, and certainly not as harmful as other environmental pollutants that are more pervasive.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/30/one-in-t...
How is that judgement communicated? Without that information the question is incomplete.
That even worse abuses such as molestation, rape, and murder exist is not a justification for corporal punishment (physical discipline), which has been shown to cause negative emotional, behavioral, and academic outcomes in children. Corporal punishment is a form of physical abuse, considering these negative outcomes.
> The Resolution on Physical Discipline of Children By Parents, adopted by APA’s Council of Representatives in February, relies on strong and sophisticated longitudinal research that finds physical discipline does not improve behavior and can lead to emotional, behavioral and academic problems over time, even after race, gender and family socioeconomic status have been statistically controlled.
Fortunately, that's not the argument I made.
1. We don't know as much as people think we do about what constitutes "good parenting". At best, we know some behaviours which are typically harmful (molestation, violence), but everyone already knows that, and the people exhibiting those behaviours need therapy themselves, so a parenting course won't fix that.
2. You're basically turning what is normally considered an innate human right into a privilege for which you need to earn a license. This invites all kinds of abuse (only the right kinds of people get this license!).