Why Does Life That Knows Suffering Repeat Itself? Self-Consciousness, Bodily Freedom, and the Meaning Structure of Care and Responsibility

This paper does not regard reproduction merely as biological repetition or as a demographic issue of fertility rates. Instead, it analyzes reproduction as a process in which self-conscious human beings come to interrogate reproduction itself as they become aware of their own bodies, suffering, freedom, responsibility, bloodline, care, and future. Life operates in a direction that seeks to preserve and repeat its own form. Human beings, however, do not merely repeat life. They are beings who ask whether that repetition is justified, whether it is bearable, and through whose bodies and lives it takes place. Human reproduction, therefore, is not simply a matter of biological possibility, but an ontological choice in which self-consciousness, meaning, responsibility, and bodily freedom converge. Existing discussions of low fertility have primarily focused on social factors such as economic costs, housing insecurity, labor conditions, educational burdens, gender inequality, and anxiety about the future. These explanations are indispensable for understanding the contemporary reproductive crisis. However, they do not fully explain why modern human beings no longer accept childbirth as a natural necessity or an unquestioned life course. This paper does not reduce contemporary low fertility to a weakening of vitality or to individualistic selfishness. Rather, low fertility may be interpreted as the result of a self-conscious recognition that reproduction is a major event that reorganizes the body and life as a whole. In particular, pregnancy and childbirth may impose asymmetrical costs on women, including bodily risk, pain, the burden of recovery, loss of time, labor burdens, career interruption, reduced mobility, and the fixation of maternal roles. These costs are not merely matters of personal preference or psychological burden. They arise from the structural fact that reproduction takes place through particular bodies. In this paper, bodily freedom refers to the degree to which an individual can independently regulate and decide the boundaries, mobility, time, risk, recovery, and reproductive possibilities of their own body. Because pregnancy and childbirth are events that can reorganize bodily freedom over the long term, they must be treated as central concerns of reproductive ethics. This paper also emphasizes that the desire for childbirth, the desire to care, and the desire for bloodline can be separated from one another. Within traditional meaning structures, childbirth, blood ties, care, family, and responsibility have often been understood as a natural continuum. However, modern human beings may desire care while refusing childbirth, and may value responsibility while refusing to regard blood ties as its sole foundation. In this sense, the refusal of childbirth is not necessarily a rejection of children or care itself. It may instead be a rejection of a structure that subordinates care to women’s bodies, bloodline, and maternal roles. The desire to care refers to a relational orientation toward protecting, sustaining, and taking responsibility for vulnerable or developing beings so that their possibilities may be preserved. Such care need not be realized only through direct childbirth or biological connection. For self-conscious human beings, reproduction becomes an event that cannot avoid ethical questioning. Human beings are aware of the suffering of life, death, contingency, an unjust world, and the possibility that parental desire may be projected onto a child. For this reason, bringing a new being into the world cannot remain merely a natural event or a private choice; it becomes an event that requires a certain degree of justification. Non-consensual birth, the possibility of suffering, the danger that a child may become a tool for parental meaning, and the sustainability of care responsibility all emerge as central problems in contemporary reproductive discourse. This p