The suffering of new birth (Srimad Bhagavatam #44)

In chapter 31, Lord Kapila gives a quite negative description of the life of a baby in the womb and after birth. Lord Kapila describes, for example, that "Bitten again and again all over the body by the hungry worms in the abdomen itself, the child suffers terrible agony because of his tenderness. He thus becomes unconscious moment after moment because of the terrible condition." And that, "Laid down on a foul bed infested with sweat and germs, the poor child is incapable of scratching his body to get relief from his itching sensation to say nothing of sitting up, standing or even moving."

This gives us a quite dark description. After reading it, one may decide to never have a child, since why should we want to put someone in such a situation? However, there are a few points to examine.

First of all, a human birth is necessary for a soul to have a reasonable chance of going back to Godhead, and especially a human birth in a family of devotees is very rare. Actually, the whole universe exists just to give souls an opportunity to go back to Godhead. Although the universe is populated by an uncountable number of living entities, there are just a few billion human beings, and out of these, just a thousand have the opportunity to take birth in nice Vaishnava families. One who agrees to provide such a rare opportunity for a carefully chosen soul surely gets a lot of credit in his or her account.

Kapila emphasizes the inconveniences of taking another birth since the idea is to convince us to go back to Godhead in this lifetime. This should be taken on the positive side, making us understand the difficulties related to taking another birth in this world and thus desiring to perfect our Krsna Consciousness in this lifetime, and not on the negative side, making us neglect our duties in family life by not having children and taking care of them. We can see that in the Bhagavad-gita Krsna also advises Arjuna to ascend into a platform of renunciation, while simultaneously performing his duty and fighting in the battle. The message of the Bhagavad-gita is centered around performing one's duties in a detached way, and not in "running from the battle" by neglecting them.