Some people will never get the opportunity to have a stable environment... through no fault of their own. Does that mean they should never have the opportunity to be parents?
And I think that's a sad world to be in where income dictates your ability to have kids. I think having kids is a right that one should be able to exercise regardless of income and it is a problem with our society that we cannot support low-income families, not a problem with the low-income parents. The fact that we have poverty-level income families with 5 or 7 kids is a failing of the education system. Nobody wants their kids to suffer. If proper education & birth-control & social resources were available a little before high-school, I bet this issue would be nearly eliminated in that parents would know themselves not to have an inordinate number of kids.
Modern US society expects you to study, work and save until you are 30 to 40 before having kids (internet boy moguls aside).
Soo... Why is autism on the rise?
I can see a case for "People without f(N) money shouldn't be allowed to have an Nth child, for N>2." It would be quite the intrusion on liberty, but I understand how people who act as K-strategists wouldn't want their offspring to be overwhelmed by r-strategists.
I also agree that society should be better structured to accomodate and support parenthood. Many European countries are doing it right.
What I'm personally ambivalent about is people forcing me to support other peoples' children, when I have delayed having my own children (and I'm in a stable relationship and we both want children) because I don't believe I'm financially able to support them.
I've sometimes had thought experiments along the lines of: if you're in welfare or otherwise financially dependant, then you should have your ability to procreate temporally restrained (there have been some amazing advances recently in reversible contraception). That would cut hard on these cases. It's not "forced" (you want to have children? sure, but don't ask for welfare), and it would allow for resources to be distributed much better to those who chose to have children and then fell on hard times (it can be the case, though the lack of a parent in the story suggests it was a case of irresponsibility and lack of contraceptives).
I actually believe as a society we should be okay supporting them. But there's a caveat. The preventative measures in place we currently have in society are not working because, IMHO, we waste too much money in WarOnDrugs and questionable wars. If we could stop doing that and ramp up the education & availabilty of birthcontrol in lower income areas, I bet there wouldn't be that many of them falling through the cracks(canyons really) in the system and ending up appearing to us as being irresponsible burdens. It would be a nice small number of people that we could handle.
If you say it is not a right, you are also saying that someone may prevent another from doing it, by force, and en masse. On a large scale, this is a time-shifted equivalent of genocide. So I say procreation is a right, and if you want to limit the exercise of it, you must provide sufficient incentives for that to be done voluntarily.
But while procreation itself is a right, you and your brood of snot-nosed brats shouldn't get automatic additional support from society when you exercise that right irresponsibly. My support has strings attached. Mostly, they are all variants of the "don't be a dick" rule.
It is indeed very tricky, better men than me have argued back and forth:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rights-human/
It seems that I'll have to agree with you and smtddr, then, that it is a right.
Once the child is born, it should be accorded all the human rights... and that's where we run into trouble.
Some interpretations of the "right to life" include the "right to survival",
http://www.hrea.org/index.php?base_id=159
I'm probably missing the right bibliography, if someone can point me to which books I should read, I would be very grateful :)
The endless debate cycle between disaffected and disenfranchised libertarians covers the topic of human rights quite often. Most of us agree that the UN declaration is not a viable framework, because some of the enumerated rights imply that someone, somewhere, would necessarily be impressed into compulsory service to enforce them. For example, a right to adequate medical care implies that someone must become a physician and supply that care, possibly without pay. The right to food implies that someone must farm it, possibly without pay.
Even the experts can make mistakes.
So rather than read what others have said on the topic, it may be better for you to simply think it out for yourself and see what you come up with. Ideally, you will come up with a set of principles that are unambiguous, self-consistent, and able to serve as the foundation for a civilized society. It's much harder than it sounds. Good luck.