Parenting & Family Quote by Leon Kass

Kass builds a trapdoor into a sentence that sounds, at first blush, like moral progress. “Every child should be wanted” is the kind of humane consensus that floats through adoption slogans, fertility clinic brochures, and policy talk about “planned” families. Then he pivots on a single word: wanted. In Kass’s framing, the same language that protects children from neglect can slide into a consumer logic where children are justified by desire, not dignity.

The intent is cautionary, not anti-parent. Kass is warning that the rhetoric of choice can quietly recast parenthood as entitlement. If the ethical baseline becomes “no unwanted children,” the next cultural move is to treat the child as a project that must match specifications: healthy, timed, optimized, temperamentally compatible. That’s where the subtext bites: the child’s existence gets tethered to adult satisfaction, and disappointment starts to look like a breach of contract. In that worldview, unconditional love is less a virtue than a customer service promise.

Context matters. Kass has long been associated with bioethics debates around reproductive technologies, genetic selection, and the politics of “designing” life. Read through that lens, this isn’t nostalgia for older family structures; it’s a critique of the market’s ability to colonize even our most intimate ideals. The line works because it exposes how easily moral language can be repurposed as branding: “wanted” can mean cherished, or it can mean ordered. Kass wants you to hear the difference before the culture forgets it.