People are not ‘having a baby’ but are creating a new person. This important distinction, which is noticed and emphasized by many antinatalists, plays an important role in procreation. Not that ‘having a baby’ is a clean phrase, as it is explicitly declaring ownership of another person, but it is the emphasis on a baby instead of a person which is even more problematic in my view.
The ‘having a baby’ formulation leads to various misconceptions regarding procreation. For example, most people are careless and irresponsible enough to not even consider harms inflicted on their children, but even the few who do, usually focus on harms typical of babies and maybe of child diseases, not on harms typical of entire human life, and on ageing, and on death.
People are ‘having a baby’ for their own sake. They are not considering their children’s caducity because they would be dead by then. It is hard to prove but it is reasonable to think that if people would be offered a child that would die of a horrible disease breaking at the age of 60 or not to have a child at all, they would go for having the child. They might convince themselves that by the time their child is 60 a cure could be found, but the truth is that they are not willing to give up on something they want because of things that will happen after they die.
Most people think babies are cute, but babies become young children very fast, and will be grownups most of their lives. Creating a person is a lifetime commitment. But people are unbelievably myopic. After the short period of infancy comes most of the life of the person created. Creating a person is getting into a lifelong commitment with someone who you have no idea how s/he is like, that person could turn out to be awful.
It is as if people don’t realize that they are creating a new person but think that they are purchasing a cute toy. They don’t think about the baby growing up and that some of the things s/he would say and do will not be very cute. Not to the parents, and definitely not to other creatures.
If most people are careless and irresponsible enough to not even consider harms inflicted on their children, they are definitely careless and irresponsible enough to not consider harms inflicted on others by their children, and this factor is even stronger when people are thinking they are ‘having a baby’ and not creating a person, as babies are perceived as innocent and harmless, despite that they are not, and despite that even if it was true, it is very temporary.
Probably the saddest thing about this is that even if people would be constantly reminded that they are not ‘having a baby’ but creating a person, a person that would necessarily suffer, that would probably age, and would inevitably die, a person that they might not like, and that might not like them, a person that would most definitely harm others, they would still do it. People are that myopic, selfish and careless.
The ‘having a baby’ formulation is significant, but it is not that a more accurate one would change things significantly. A significant change requires much more than a linguistic formulation alteration, it requires a biological one.
Humans don’t take responsibility for bringing a real person, being and personality into this world. They think it is about rising someone from scratch. I personally don’t believe we can create a consciousness through reproduction. So it means we bring a soul of an already existing being into a human body. I don’t believe it’s a right that we have. We don’t know who the ‘baby’ (person) will be or already is.