Parental duty

Another excerpt from my forthcoming One Body book, this time from the discussion of gamete donation (challenge to the reader: find the relevance of this to gamete donation):

Now, it is not merely the duty of the parents to bring it about that the children are cared for and appropriately educated morally, religiously and academically. Rather, it is the duty of the parents to care for and educate the child—i.e., to do it themselves. In caring for and educating the child, parents will make use of the help of others, including that of family members, friends, and professionals. How much the parents can rely on the help of others before they have failed in their duty of caring for and educating the child will depend on the circumstances.
There are thus two aspects of the parental duty: (a) caring for and educating, and (b) ensuring that the child is cared for and educated. In other words, there is the aspect of parental activity and the aspect of results. These two aspects need to be balanced prudently, and, moreover, balanced with other duties the parents may have; how they are balanced will depend on particular circumstances. In no cases will it be desirable and rarely will it be possible for the parents directly to care for and educate the child in all respects with the help of no one else. Moral education, for instance, requires contact with virtuous people of a significant variety of different characters, not just the parents. Academic education should typically include education in subjects in which the parents lack competency. The need to work to earn money to provide for the child can force the parents to delegate a significant degree care to a third party.
Here is an observation worth making. In most couples, there will be specialization. Thus, the mother might be working long hours to earn the money needed to diaper, feed, clothe, and house the child, while the father might be changing the diapers, feeding, clothing, and otherwise taking care of the child for most of the day. It might seem that in such cases, each parent will be neglecting an aspect of the parental responsibility to himself or herself care for and educate the child. But we can respond to this by noting that parents should be friends of each other, and bringing in an idea from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle considers what value there in having good friends. He observes that friends share a life, a friend is “another self,” and one can be active through one’s friend’s activity: what the friend does virtuously is something that accrues to oneself.

The value of the pleasure in sex

When loving parents make decisions concerning their teenage children, they put very small, if any, weight on the physical pleasure of sex as isolated from other things. For instance, that some course of action is likely to increase the number of times that the child experiences the physical pleasure of sex counts very little in favor of the course of action—it may even count against it. Parents are either mistaken in this weighting or not.

We would expect parents to be more reliable in weighing the values of pleasures of activities that they themselves find pleasurable. But typical adults do find sex pleasurable, and presumably that includes the parents (and may even help explain why they are parents). Indeed, typical adults find sex physically as pleasant as teenagers do, or more so due to greater experience. Moreover, I think we would expect parents if anything to be better judges of the values of outcomes in the case of their children than in their own case, at least when the outcomes are ones that the parents are familiar with and find pleasant or unpleasant in much the way that the children do. One is likely to be more clearheaded when one is making decisions for someone else.

But if this is right, then parents are probably right when they put very low weight on the physical pleasure of sex in the case of their children. Thus, probably, the physical pleasure of sex has very low value in the case of children, at least in itself. But since this physical pleasure is basically the same in adults (perhaps somewhat greater due to experience, but likely not an order of magnitude greater, at least in males), it follows that the physical pleasure of sex in and of itself, isolated from other considerations, has very low value in general. (Of course, the pleasure as combined with other goods may have significant value.)

Can it be instrumentally rational for a parent to object to a child's receiving contraception?

Let's bracket all moral concerns, and simply suppose that the parent does not count sexual activity by her minor children as having positive utility (or at least counts it as of such low utility as to be negligible), but does count a pregnancy (in the child or caused by the child) as a significantly negative outcome. Rhetoric from those advocating greater availability of contraception to children suggests that such a parent would be instrumentally irrational to object to the child's receiving contraception.

However, this is mistaken. Typically, children also consider a pregnancy a significantly negative outcome. Therefore, in a large enough population, there will be children who would be very unlikely to engage in sexual activity if there is a significant danger of pregnancy, but if that danger were significantly reduced, would engage in sexual activity. In the case of such children, it may very well be the case that the availability of contraception increases the risk of pregnancy. For instance, suppose that without contraception, over the period of a year the child would have a probability of 0.98 of not engaging in sexual relations at all. But if the pill is made available, the child has a probability of 0.50 of using it and having an average sexual frequency for sexually active persons.

Now, if contraception is not made available, the likelihood of a pregnancy is (0.02)(0.85)=0.017, where I shall suppose 0.85 is the probability of conception without contraceptives at an average sexual frequency for a sexually active person. This is actually an overestimate of the likelihood of a pregnancy, since if the child is afraid of a pregnancy outcome, the frequency is likely to be significantly lower. If the pill is made available, the likelihood of a pregnancy then will be (0.50)(0.05)=0.025, where the 0.05 is permthe typical-use failure rate for oral contraceptives.

Therefore, a parent who knows with a sufficiently high probability that her child satisfies the above assumptions and seeks to prevent the child's pregnancy will be instrumentally rational in refusing contraception for that child.

Moreover, since there surely are such children in the population (there is, obviously, a broad distribution in the attribute of caution in teenagers, and there are teenagers who are very cautious), it follows that even if making contraception available to all teenagers were to reduce the overall pregnancy rate (and I am not aware of any data that it would), there would be some individuals the risks for whom would be increased by the availability of contraception. And, of course, there will be individuals the risks for whom would be decreased by the availability of contraception—namely, those who would have a sufficiently large sexual frequency even without contraception. Therefore, making contraception available to all teenagers results in a redistribution of risks—some come to be better off pregnancy-wise and some come to be worse off.

Now, while it can be licit to have a public health initiative that redistributes risks, increasing those of some and decreasing those of others, significant gathering of empirical data is needed before any such policy is put into place, to ensure not only that the overall risk is decreased, but also that no subgroup's risk is increased in a way that is morally unacceptable. For instance, if a chemical added to the water were to improve the dental health of a majority ethnic group but decrease the dental health of a minority ethnic group, the introduction of that chemical would be morally problematic—significant amount of information-gathering would need to be done, and attempts to limit the application of the initiative to the minority might well need to be made (e.g., not adding the chemical in the areas where members of the minority group are more likely to be found).

In particular, the following empirical outcome is imaginable. It could be that the availability of contraceptives significantly increases the likelihood of pregnancy among religiously conservative teenagers, because without the availability of contraceptives they have two reasons to avoid sex: (a) religion and (b) pregnancy (and disease, but what I say about pregnancy applies to STIs mutatis mutandis), which two reasons may result in a high probability of abstinence and hence a close to zero pregnancy rate (rape can happen despite abstinence, so it's not exactly zero), while with the availability of contraceptives the second reason largely drops out, and the abstinence rate may significantly decrease. If that were so, then there would be an identifiable group for whom the risk of pregnancy would be increased by the availability of contraception. I do not know if it is so or not—that is an empirical question, and either answer is possible depending on how the probabilities work out. But it is not irrational for parents of religiously conservative children to worry that the availability of contraception might increase the risks of pregnancy for these children, and it might well be irrational to be confident that it does not increase these risks unless one has significant empirical data (of which I am not aware).