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Saving unwanted children: a proposal for a National Rearing Institute

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Abstract

Unwanted children are carried, born, and reluctantly raised each year; they are prone to abortion, abandonment, neglect, and abuse. Meanwhile, many developed societies are suffering from depopulation. To address these two issues concurrently, I propose that governments should grant pregnant women and mothers an irreversible and unconditional one-time chance to relinquish all their legal rights and obligations associated with each of their children under a specific age to a National Rearing Institute that adopts the children and rears them to the age when they can fully exercise their rights as adult citizens. I call this set of policy arrangements “Project New Republicans.” This project aims to (1) protect and support the best interests of unwanted children, (2) maximize the health outcomes of the mothers who gave birth to these children and help the mothers to achieve self-realization, and (3) preserve an influx to the population from procreation against depopulation. The project is primarily grounded on both the utilitarian and intra- / inter-generational accounts of justice. It also ameliorates the oppression and domination of women by unjust social structures in alignment with the human rights-based approach.

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Notes

  1. The term “state” in this paper refers to a nation-state or a sovereign state; the basic unit of political interaction at the global level and the unit of exercising absolute political authority at the national level. The term does not refer to the states that are united under a federalist national government, such as in the United States.

  2. The term “Republican” in this paper hence does not refer to the supporters, voters, or politicians of a major political party Republican Party (a.k.a. Grand Old Party, GOP) in the US or any other specific political parties in the real world.

  3. This idea was first proposed in a paper currently under review that was written by Ming-Jui Yeh and Po-Han Lee.

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Acknowledgements

Special thanks are due to David Mai, Feng-Yi Liu, and Po-Han Lee for their useful comments, and to TWH for her inspiration on the research topic.

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  1. Institute of Health Policy and Management, College of Public Health, National Taiwan University, 17 Xuzhou Road, Taipei, 100, Taiwan

    Ming-Jui Yeh

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Yeh, MJ. Saving unwanted children: a proposal for a National Rearing Institute. Theor Med Bioeth 44, 435–452 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-023-09621-7

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