If someone falls into a lake, bystanders have no enforceable obligation to save them. However, if you push someone into a lake, you have an enforceable obligation to save them because you are responsible for putting them in a state of peril. This is a principle of jurisprudence: one may acquire positive obligations by placing someone in a state of peril.
When parents create a child, one consequence is that the child is in a state of temporary helplessness or peril. Therefore, the parents have an enforceable obligation to bring the child out of this state of helplessness. This means doing whatever it takes to raise them safely to the independence or self-sufficiency of adulthood. The parents have responsibility for the child in the same way that someone who pushes a person into a lake has a responsibility to rescue them. This is the basis of the causal principle of parental obligations.
Pushing someone into a lake is only an analogy, as there are important differences to creating a child. The act of pushing someone into a lake is itself an act of aggression, as well as the creation of peril. In contrast, creating a child is not an act of aggression, although it is an act that creates peril as a consequence. The creation of peril is not aggression, but it does give rise to a positive obligation.
For example, it is not an act of aggression against a child for the parents to purchase a firearm. However, leaving a firearm in the vicinity of the child would put him in danger. In purchasing the weapon, the parents have an obligation to remove the child from this particular peril by securely storing the firearm.
Similarly, creating a child is not itself an act of aggression against the child. However, as a side effect of his creation, the child is in a general state of peril owing to his vulnerability. This is why the parents have responsibility to remove the child from peril by raising him.
A competing theory argues that creating a child does not entail placing someone in peril and therefore parents do not have enforceable obligations. In this view, parents are more like the bystanders who see someone fall into a lake. The child may be helpless (I.e. in peril- just as the person in a lake is in peril) but this view argues that the child's helplessness is not a source of responsibility for the parents. This alternative view is the Theory of Parenting as Charity.
Parental obligation does not arise through contract but rather as a result of the parents' actions being causally responsible for the peril that the child faces. Even if the parents did not intend to create a child (and even if they took the precaution of using contraceptives), creating a life was a foreseeable risk that they are responsible for. In legal terms, it is a strict liability tort.
An understanding of the causal principle of parental obligation began to emerge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but it is still relatively unknown. Even the early proponents of the principle were slow to realise that it has truly radical implications:
- Voluntarily making your gametes available for fusion is the act that creates parental obligations, regardless of whether any resultant child was intended.
- Both the mother and father are jointly and severally liable for their obligations.
- Parental obligation is to the child, not anyone else (not the other parent, nor society at large)
- Pregnancy is not an act of creation, it is an act of nurturing a child that has already come into existence at conception.
- Abortion is incompatible with parental obligations.
- Parents cannot legitimately absolve themselves of their obligation by giving up a child for adoption
- Gamete donation cannot be justified
- You cannot give up your parental obligations.