Hugh Lafollete's Argument To Licensing Parents

In what situation is it justifiably reasonable for the government to intervene in the process of child development, before the child is born or after? Is it logical or ethical to play eugenics in the sake of raising children for a better future? In Hugh LaFollete’s essay “Licensing Parents”, he offers a new approach to parenting, the right to license parents. LaFollete argues that the licensing of parents is not only “theoretically desirable”, he also lays out how licensing could be established by talking about the “rights to have a child”. And although LaFollete does makes a good point about why licensing parents is a good idea, I will also point out some flaws in his essay to his position.
LaFollete’s basic argument argues that the concept

of licensing parents is just like licensing a driver or a pharmacist in the sense that, that certain activity has the potential to harm others and should be regulated to prevent any incompetent people from doing such harm. In his essay, he uses the example of a car and a driver’s license to demonstrate his point that the act of driving is similar to the act of raising a child, as well as a psychologist, a doctor and a lawyer because the actions that they perform has the potential power to harm others. He suggests to, “imagine a world in which everyone could legally drive a car, in which everyone could legally perform surgery, prescribe medications, dispensed drugs, or offer legal advice” (LaFollete 183), These are all acts that have the power to either lead a person to drug overdose, death with a wrong incision, death with the wrong prescription or prescription combination, or result in some jail time, all acts that can have negative long term consequences if not regulated or have knowledgeable expertise on to prevent these disasters. The act of licensing is put into place in order to weed out the group of people who are not cut out to be licensed the important and potentially harmful roles, such as lawyers and doctors, based on whether they are not knowledgeable enough or have the right ethics or reasoning to even pursue a degree. He argues that licensing parents is not made to find the world’s best parent but instead, to only weed out the terrible ones. In the case of driving, the driver’s test only tests for your competence as a driver to protect the innocent people that can be harmed. When applied to the perspective of licensing a parent, a test will only test for the competence of raising a child to protect the innocent children that will be affected. Now that we have talked about LaFollete’s basic argument we can now talk about his point on the supposed “right to have children”.
When it comes to having the “rights to have children”, there are several objection that he has found. The first objecting argument is that since we all have the right to free speech, with would be unjust to license the ability to speak freely. Similarly, like free speech, we have the right to have children, it would be unfair to license parents. The problem with this analogy is that even though we do have free speech, we are still limited either way from stuff like slander, as it is frowned upon to protect the innocent and can potentially get you arrested in some cases. In the case of the “right to have children”, licensing parents can be limited for the sake of protecting the innocent children. The second objecting argument that the phrase “the right to have children” is too vague. LaFollete argues that this phrase can be applied to any situations. In this case, this argument of licensing parent can be applied to whether a woman is infertile or when you have bad parenting ethics. Another possible situation is when only in the case if when one is denied of a parental license are the ones who are truly affected by the licensing where they would have to deal with the government. LaFollete concludes that only people who don’t abuse or neglect their children while being able to provide the basic needs such as food and care will have the license to the rights of the child as to the point of his need to license parents is to make sure the parents to the child is not neglected or abused and predict any possible bad parent to prevent any neglect from happening. But when a license is obtained, there will still be limitations and regulations as to what you can and cannot do with a child.
As much as I would like to agree with LaFollete’s argument to license parents, personally I don't see his argument as a realistic argument, in fact it is flawed.

One of the biggest problem with LaFollete’s argument is that this is a form of eugenics. Eugenics is the belief and practice of trying to improve the overall genetic quality of the population by encouraging the good traits and discouraging the bad traits in order to breed the desired population, choosing usually the biggest, strongest or healthiest of the pack to reproduce and thus creating super children. In some cases eugenics is not a bad thing in some situations like for the sake of survival, which is not necessary our situation because we already have some of the most advanced medical facilities in the world that will ensure our survival. On top of that, it is more often times frowned upon, for the reason that it is unnatural and can often times lean toward racist and classist in this society if the parental licensing is to be practiced. If the licensing were to be practiced, there would be a high chance that there would be racial bias when it comes to applying for the license, admitting a certain race more than the other, or being classist, claiming that only the upper class is allowed a license because only they have the resources that a child need. Even worse, the parents who do take the test to obtain a license can also ignore what is encouraged in the test and continue raising their child according to

their ethics. To add on, the phrase “basic needs” is also a vague phrase because it doesn’t define to what level does the phrase ‘basic needs” define as, so, whoever that is issuing the license can define “basic needs” as whatever they’d like which would result in a rigged licensing system.
The second argument I have is that parental licensing will be a hard law to practice, hugely because human reproduction is a natural process and it is something that cannot be regulated, especially for a population on of approximately 321 million citizens in the United states as of 2015, according to the US Census Bureau, not including the illegal immigrant population that is left unaccounted for.

Issuing a license will decrease the US population significantly, discouraging idea of sex in the fear of accidentally producing a children and having to go through the hassle of applying for a license that they may or may not be able to obtain. It can also encourage safer sex practices like birth control and condom usage, which is not necessarily a bad thing. On top of that, it will also cause a lot of traffic in the beginning process of issuing license for already existing parents which will take a long time before all parenting license will be put into practice, which can be a good thing because this will create lot of new jobs which will lead to more spending and boosting the economy but is time consuming. Another question that will arise when applying for a license that LaFollete did not cinsuder is what if the parent are not able to obtain a license? What will happen to the children? LaFollete can call for the children to be put into an orphanage to be put up to adoption by better parents or into a social service program but the potential flaw in that argument can be that the

social service program is not an effective program to begin with that already has too much problem to deal with to start off. Second, there would be a large influx of orphan that will be neglected even more due to the fact that some organization will have to take care of the children and may or may not have enough supplies to provide the children with the basic necessities and love that a child needs that a parent can provide. The orphan will be neglected and potentially abused from living in a large institution which ultimatley defeats LaFolletes’s basic argument for a parental license. There will not be enough adopting couples in the United States that would want an older child that already has a previous connections to their previous family, resulting in becoming the “rebels” that Lafollete is trying to prevent.
Although Hugh Lafollete’s arguments is flawed, there are a few benefits that we can take from LaFollete’s argument for licensing parents. The first being that requiring parents to take a test before receiving their licenses will encourage potential parents to be more aware of their parenting style, while educating them on what they should and should not be doing with their children, thus being more conscious of what they are doing. This will also weed out the incompetent parents, preventing them from harming more kids. Second, the children will grow up in a more controlled and nurturing environment that will lead to a more advanced future generation. Personally I don't think that licensing a parent is necessary. What the United States should be more focused on is providing the necessary resources to the citizens so they can get educated themselves and the proper resources to provide their child in order to create a more utopian society. To answer the initial question of whether or not it is ethical to mess with eugenics for the sake of procreating a better generation, I would say no because there are far more long term effects at stake where the negatives outweighs the benefits. Licensing parents is too big of a step to jump from what we currently have to and maybe we should slowly ease into that idea by improving what we already have today.