Here's one counterargument: Psychological pain per se doesn't seem like a good enough reason to decide that a child should not exist - because that pain takes

Here's one counterargument: Psychological pain per se doesn't seem like a good enough reason to decide that a child should not exist - because that pain takes all sorts of forms. And it's so npredictable. Children of parents who don't abandon them are often painfully hurt for many reasons. And some children whose parents cannot be with them are not particularly wounded by it. Otherwise think of all the children of military personnel, who only see their parent occasionally. Many grow up fine. Is it reckless to allow military personnel to breed? Here's another counterargument: Perhaps it would be ultimately reckless to reduce diversity in the gene pool (or meme pool) by only allowing people who are a good fit for current society's ever-varying codes to pass on their genes. (That's a variation on the "are you sure it's healthy for humans if only rich people breed" argument.) I tend to think the attraction-and-breeding instinct is best treated with great respect and allowed to proceed if the people involved want to do it, as though it carries some kind of evolutionary wisdom greater than our small-minded culture. Like one of those "meta" rules of the game; if they're in love, let them be, even if they're judged criminals. I suspect that the enormous variation in how children turn out confirms this, especially when outcomes over multiple generations are tracked, but I'm no sociologist so I don't know.