In like manner,
from the fact of procreation in the union thus constituted, there
follows the duty of preserving and rearing children as the products of
this union. Accordingly, children, as persons, have, at the same time,
an original congenital right- distinguished from mere hereditary
right- to be reared by the care of their parents till they are capable
of maintaining themselves; and this provision becomes immediately
theirs by law, without any particular juridical act being required
to determine it.
For what is thus produced is a person, and it is impossible to think
of a being endowed with personal freedom as produced merely by a
physical process. And hence, in the practical relation, it is quite
a correct and even a necessary idea to regard the act of generation as
a process by which a person is brought without his consent into the
world and placed in it by the responsible free will of others. This
act, therefore, attaches an obligation to the parents to make their
children- as far as their power goes- contented with the condition
thus acquired. Hence parents cannot regard their child as, in a
manner, a thing of their own making; for a being endowed with
freedom cannot be so regarded. Nor, consequently, have they a right to
destroy it as if it were their own property, or even to leave it to
chance; because they have brought a being into the world who becomes
in fact a citizen of the world, and they have placed that being in a
state which they cannot be left to treat with indifference, even
according to the natural conceptions of right.
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