The Poverty of Wealth

"But what if the parents are poor and they start having to many kids isn't that unfair to the children."

Ok, there are a lot of fundamental issues involved in this question/statement, so it's difficult to know where to begin. I think I'll have to start by asking what is a greater poverty, lack of material possessions, or lack of selfless love and giving of life?

Before we can address the issue of fairness, we have to address this issue concerning the true nature of poverty. Westerners, and particularly Americans, live in the most powerful, affluent, decadent society ever created by Mankind. Only the Roman Empire could compete in terms of relative affluence, and I'd say the average American has vastly more than the average Roman ever did in terms of material wealth. And yet, the vast majority of human history has been dominated by societies which are poorer than American society, while the families within those societies consistently had far more children than industrialized and wealthy nations today have. That's right, the poorest epochs of human history have also involved larger families.

The reasons for this are numerous, and here are some basic utilitarian ones. Agrarian societies that have a more vibrant farm and rural life tend to need more children for the extra hands to man the farm. Early industrial societies likewise involve families flocking to cities and needing more money, so children with income potential were a boon to any family trying to survive in this new environment. Not to mention the fact that while contraceptives and abortions still occurred, they were nowhere near the norm they are at today.

The fact remains that despite poverty, families have historically been able to have more than one or two children, in fact greater numbers of children often was an aid to the family, not a problem. It's only relatively recent child labor laws that have altered that in many respects, and the artificial construct of a "childhood" in the modern world which never existed before. By this I mean that children were only children for a short while, the things people now write off as childish behavior in teenagers being acceptable would never have been two hundred years ago, let alone two thousand years ago. Human persons have the ability to live adult lives much earlier than they now are expected to, now they are expected to be immature and hedonistic for at least 20 years before they grow up. Which of course feeds into the problem, which is not poverty, it's selfishness.

The reason the richest societies in the world have stopped having children isn't because they can't afford them. This is a myth perpetuated by those who would rather not face the truth. And the truth is that these societies have become more enamored of material wealth and possessions than they have of family and children. The question people ask themselves, and the excuse they rationalize to allow for their behavior is whether they can afford to have children and maintain the same level of pure selfish materialism that they have enjoyed prior to having children. Families used to exist and function just fine with half a dozen kids and their parents living in two room homes. Now mansions are virtually empty and devoid of life because the people who live in them cannot sacrifice their comforts for children, or they have one "designer baby," and stop there, spoiling their child rotten and condemning that child to the same expected level of wealth.

We have constructed a world in which material wealth is all that matters, and having children gets in the way of amassing more of it. Children mean sacrifice, they mean loving someone more than you love the things in your life, the luxuries and pleasures. And children, as joyous and pleasurable as they are can also be big, messy pains. They break things, they keep you up at night, they get sick and require you to stay home, etc. The converse, in a world where contraceptives and abortions are plentiful is far more attractive to people used to living in perpetual pleasure and wealth. So they do. And in so doing they've created a new poverty, a poverty that involves the loss of one of the greatest joys of existence, which is sharing in the Creator's joy, and self giving in love. The real question we need to start asking ourselves is not whether we can afford to have kids, it's whether we can afford NOT to.

Now, there was a concern in your question addressing the subject of fairness. The fundamental problem with any question of the fairness of a given action is that fairness itself is non-existent. The belief in something being fair is based on a human sense of entitlement to a given thing or action. If we believe ourselves entitled to something, and yet we do not receive it, we believe ourselves victims of unfairness. The fact of the matter, however, is that upon examination it must be admitted that humans are entitled to virtually nothing in this life. Our very existence is, if one is a theist, a GIFT from God, not an entitlement. And even if one is an atheist, it still has to be admitted that our existence can be nothing more than accident, it is certainly not something we are entitled to. So what does fairness really mean, since it cannot mean we're entitled to something?

If it is to mean anything valuable at all, fairness must refer to whether something is Just or not. Which means that having children is probably not part of it to begin with. God, who is Just, has blessed human kind and desires us to be fruitful and multiply and share in the ability to give life and create. Anyone making the argument that giving the highest good is unjust is going to have a difficult time.

So when you ask whether it would be somehow unfair to children whose parents have lots of children as opposed to a few, even when they are poor and cannot provide all the material comforts of modern Western society, I have to say no. Children, indeed human beings, are not entitled to material comfort, and the act of procreation is in fact giving someone the great gift of existence, the highest good there is. Therefore, it certainly cannot be said to be unfair to the child or children born into a large, poor family. If anything, I'd be more worried about the children born to wealthy parents who are not taught the joys of family life, of the value of large families and sharing in Creation with God. They are the ones most likely to grow up spoiled, selfish, and weak. Children who live lives with the great wealth of a strong, vibrant family, seem far likelier to be less spoiled, less worried about material things, more interested in the value of family, etc. They're vastly more lucky than those born into the poverty of materialism.