Abstract

What I most appreciate about H. Theixos and S. B. Jamil’s article, “The Bad Habit of Bearing Children,” is their basic scrutiny of unreflective procreation. Bearing biological children is not a bad habit in the way that smoking is a bad habit. There is nothing intrinsically harmful to a parent’s health in bearing a biological child.Nor is bearing biological children a bad habit in the way that biting one’s nails is a bad habit. There is nothing socially unacceptable in bearing biological children; on the contrary, for married couples at least, it is largely a social expectation. Bearing biological children is a bad habit precisely because it is often done out of habit, rather than as the result of conscious and ..