Parenting & Family Quote by David Brin

Brin slips a blade into one of society's most protected myths: that parenthood is pure gift, beyond accounting. By framing birth as a "debt", he flips the moral direction of obligation. The child didn’t request existence; the parents made the choice. That single, icy word "unasked" turns sentiment into consent politics, smuggling a radical premise into a plain sentence: creating someone is an act with downstream liabilities, not just downstream pride.

The second line reads like a maxim from someone who’s watched good intentions wreck lives. It’s not about politeness; it’s about power. An "offer" is never neutral when the other person can accept it and thereby trigger consequences you’d prefer not to own. In the parenting context, the offer is implicit and enormous: life, identity, expectations, the family narrative. If you don’t know "full well" what acceptance entails, you weren’t being generous; you were being reckless, dressing a gamble up as virtue.

Brin’s science-fiction sensibility matters here. SF is obsessed with unintended consequences, with creators who can’t control their creations, with civilizations learning that technology (or ideology, or love) doesn’t absolve responsibility. The subtext is a warning against moral outsourcing: don’t hide behind tradition, biology, or "we meant well". If you initiate an irreversible condition for someone else, you inherit the duty to face the bill when it comes due.