Psychological pain per se doesn't seem like a good enough reason to decide that a child should not exist - because that pain takes all sorts of forms. And it's so npredictable. Children of parents who don't abandon them are often painfully hurt for many reasons. And some children whose parents cannot be with them are not particularly wounded by it. Otherwise think of all the children of military personnel, who only see their parent occasionally. Many grow up fine. Is it reckless to allow military personnel to breed?

Here's another counterargument:

Perhaps it would be ultimately reckless to reduce diversity in the gene pool (or meme pool) by only allowing people who are a good fit for current society's ever-varying codes to pass on their genes.

(That's a variation on the "are you sure it's healthy for humans if only rich people breed" argument.)

I tend to think the attraction-and-breeding instinct is best treated with great respect and allowed to proceed if the people involved want to do it, as though it carries some kind of evolutionary wisdom greater than our small-minded culture. Like one of those "meta" rules of the game; if they're in love, let them be, even if they're judged criminals. I suspect that the enormous variation in how children turn out confirms this, especially when outcomes over multiple generations are tracked, but I'm no sociologist so I don't know.

Very few people are able to escape that.

Some that don't want to escape it are forced into that by circumstance.

Nowdays, many people don't want kids.

Do you believe that people are descended from ancestors in the Garden of Eden?

If not, the most rational explanation is that we are descended from ancient organisms on primordial Earth. Perhaps not even Earth (i.e. panspermia).

How many billions of generations of asexual reproduction as single celled organisms? How many millions of generations of multi celled animals? How many thousands of generations of Homo Sapiens?

Each and every one of your ancestors reproduced. They survived long enough to reproduce. Probability 1. Not probability 0.9999999999. Probability 1.

That is such an astonishing thing that it is literally inconceivable (not capable of being imagined or grasped mentally; unbelievable) by me, at least not fully.

And yet, here we are. All of us. We've all won the lottery of life. We, each and every one of us, are here because each and every one of our ancestors brought a child into the world.

That's why he had a child. Because each and every one of his ancestors had a child. And many of those children survived in a far far more difficult environment than what we find ourselves in today.

That biological imperative outweighs everything else. This isn't usually conscious. This doesn't have to be rational. It's hardwired deeply into our DNA. Because we wouldn't be here unless it was.

This is not how it works.

It's only recently that new life can be created by other means. E.g. nowadays it is possible to remove the nuclear DNA from an egg and transfer it to another egg.