You Cannot Give Up Parental Obligations

An AI narration of the article 'You Cannot Give Up Parental Obligations' by Jake Desyllas. Parental obligations exist because creating a child places that child in a state of peril, and the parents are the ones causally responsible for that peril. From this foundation, Jake draws an unsettling conclusion: those obligations cannot be legitimately given up. Through carefully constructed thought experiments — a bonfire that endangers a neighbour's house, a swimmer pushed into a lake — he shows that delegating the task to someone else does not erase the original obligation. The argument cuts across unintended parenthood, adoption, and gamete donation, with implications many will find uncomfortable. If parents cannot legitimately absolve themselves of their obligations, what does that mean for the practices and institutions we have built around the idea that they can? Chapters: 0:00 Introduction 3:33 Unintended Parenthood 5:45 Parents Who Give Up Their Child For Adoption 10:04 Gamete Donors/Sellers 11:47 Conclusion First published at on 8 October 2024.

You can listen to You Cannot Give Up Parental Obligations online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

You Cannot Give Up Parental Obligations is an episode from The Voluntary Life by Jake Desyllas.

This episode is 13:12 long.

This episode was published on May 31, 2026.

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