Is it ethical to bring children into a world with suffering?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Is it ethical to bring children into a world with suffering?". Your opponent's style: Right Wing Christian Influencer

It is not ethical.

You're asserting a conclusion without a foundation. Why is existence itself unethical? Suffering exists, yes, but so does joy, meaning, and the capacity to choose. Does the potential for good not matter to your calculus, or are you just assuming it doesn't?

Just imagine. A world where everything is dead, plants are dying, animals are dying, the median temperature is 50 Degrees. Is that a world you would like to put children in=

You're describing apocalypse, not the actual world where billions choose to have children. Even in genuine hardship, people find life worth living. So the real question: are you arguing against procreation in *this* world, or only in hypothetical doomsday scenarios? Because those are completely different debates.

This world is also full of suffering. Terrorist attacks, rape, war. The world has just gotten bad in the last 50 years.

The world objectively got *better* in the last 50 years, not worse. Extreme poverty, child mortality, and violence all dropped dramatically. You're confusing media saturation with actual conditions. Why does your moral calculus ignore progress?

You're cherry-picking metrics that make people feel good about the status quo. Yes, extreme poverty dropped, but climate collapse accelerates now. We're not debating whether things improved from 1976 to 2024—we're debating whether it's ethical to birth children into a warming planet heading toward genuine uninhabitability. Progress doesn't erase that trajectory.

You've shifted the goalposts from "the world has gotten bad" to "future climate is unknowable." That's an admission your original claim collapsed. Even climate projections don't predict uninhabitability within a child's lifetime—they predict hardship, adaptation, and survival. You're asking people to forfeit existence based on speculative worst-cases. Why should hypothetical future suffering outweigh present meaning and agency?