Antinatalism

"If attachment is an evil, we must look for its cause in the scandal of birth, for to be born is to be attached. Detachment then should apply itself to getting rid of the traces of this scandal, the most serious and intolerable of all."

"Whoever trusts us will remain single; those who do not trust us will rear children. And if the race of men should cease to exist there would be as much cause for regret as there would be if the flies and wasps should pass away."

"When we give up on having children, we give up a small and dubious personal satisfaction to prevent the emergence of great suffering. If we can exercise a minimum of compassion for what, according to ourselves, will be the sole object of our love and dedication, we will see that, by not reproducing, we will be putting into practice the only possible kindness toward our children. Let us be comforted to know that, because they were not born, in our dreams they will always be sleeping in their rooms, under blankets as soft as the embrace of the one whose love would never allow them to suffer, and thereby protected them from existence. They remain comfortable, serene, in peace, with a half-smile on their lips for never having tasted the bitterness and disappointment of life. They will always remain pure, eternally free from the dangers of the world. This is the true meaning of giving up one's life in favor of one's children."

"Nothing is a better proof of how far humanity has regressed than the impossibility of finding a single nation, a single tribe, among whom birth still provokes mourning and lamentations."

"With what I know, with what I feel, I could not give life to someone without falling into a total contradiction with myself, without being intellectually dishonest and without committing a moral crime. It is interesting that this attitude in me is really old, as I'd had it before crystallizing my thoughts on this subject. I started feeling disgust towards procreation very early; it was an answer to my horror; not only: to the horror of life and the thirst for it. I never accepted sex other than for pleasure. Its proper function always created in me an insurmountable aversion. I would never voluntarily agree to take responsibility for life."

"Murder is the curtailing of a life that would have ended anyway; having a child creates a death that would never have been."

"Small children continue crying for many years; they cry and cry. This is a very usual spectacle that we constantly observe in the streets, children crying incessantly, most of the time met with a wall of indifference from adults, or else with laughter or impatience. Crying children often bother us, but we have to make a philosophical effort to understand that, from an ethical point of view, they are perfectly right, they have the right to cry. Moved by their tears, we have to accept their vindication, even if cries are strident and bothersome; we must learn to see children’s crying as ethical responses or instinctive political facts, as a perfectly fair and understandable reaction to what was done to them. Children’s tears must provoke our most profound respect, because they come from the depths of their structural helplessness, of their being made by force."

"The situation we have is basically the following: an individual deliberately inflicts great physical, emotional and psychological suffering on someone else in the hope of diminishing his own, and the victim will never be able to defend himself from such aggression, except through suicide. Logically, the pain will not be caused directly by us, but by the circumstances in which we place the individual. However, this could have been avoided with any cheap condom. To cause great pain to an innocent person, just to achieve a small reduction of our own, is a vile and revolting act. We could, without a doubt, feel entitled to demand reparation for such injustice, for having been placed in this unworthy and degrading situation. It would make sense to receive compensation for the inconvenience of being born, but this is something that, as was said, nature has already wisely provided in the form of an instinct to protect the offspring. Parental love is the indemnity that children receive from their parents for having placed them in the world."

"Unfortunately for mankind—and perhaps fortunately for tyrants—the poor and downtrodden lack the instinct or pride of the elephant, who refuses to breed in captivity."

"In the Council of 1211 against the Bogomils, those among them were anathematized who held that "woman conceives in her womb by the cooperation of Satan, that Satan abides there upon conception without withdrawing hence until the birth of the child". I dare not suppose that the Devil can be concerned with us to the point of keeping us company for so many months, but I cannot doubt that we have been conceived under his eyes and that he actually attended our beloved begetters."

"Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately it is within no one's reach."

"Once again, I want to pray, cry. dissolve, be nothing, return to the initial zero from before birth."

"I do not hate life or desire death, I only regret being born. I prefer non-birth from life and death. The bliss of non-birth. The longer I live, the more willingly I give myself to the joy of non-birth."

"If a child, for whose existence I was responsible, were to ask me why he or she were here, what happens after death, whether I could guarantee he or she would not suffer a fate like that Furuta Junko suffered in 1988/89 (please look it up, as there's no room to describe it), what would I say? To me, the fact I have no answers that would not be guesswork, evasion or dogma indicates that having children is selfish and cruel."

"What is most curious is that humans of poorer classes are usually the ones who cultivate an unlimited adoration for their mother for having raised them with so many sacrifices. They suffer all kinds of misery, extreme poverty, disease, delinquency, discrimination, exclusion and torture, never realizing that it was their parents who put them in that situation for their own pleasure or due to irresponsible carelessness. And when the child commits some harmful act driven by the despair in which they were placed, people still sympathize with the "poor mother" for having a child that is "so ungrateful". All inherited misery magically becomes the child's responsibility! The same argumentative scheme which is applied here, is also applied in the theodicies: the impeccable Parent created their child out of love, gave them something very valuable, and also made them "free", while the child, being free, sinned, thus behaved wrongly and defiled this very valuable thing which was given to them, causing dissatisfaction for their unfortunate parent. It is an almost tragicomic scheme, because it is the exact opposite that seems to be true: our parents gave us, for their own pleasure and benefit, something of very dubious value which we, as a result of subjection and necessity – that is, very far from any real "freedom" – have to try to improve with a lot of our effort. As long as we do not reverse this prevailing valuation in our societies, ethical issues cannot even begin to be seriously considered, because the mother's viscerally egocentric and manipulative relationship with their children will continue to be regarded as a paradigm of ethical morality, which seems, at least, to be a crucial error of appreciation, a very serious mythology, a colossal mystification."

"All of the inescapable and tyrannical bodily necessities are already presented to the baby in the form of new cries and sufferings. Progenitors will become increasingly conscious of this and they will keep saying: “He’s crying; maybe he’s hungry”; “He’s crying; maybe he's cold”; “He’s crying; maybe he’s tired”, without ever arriving at the ominous “He’s crying because he was born”."

"Non-living matter, being purely objective, is oblivious to the subjective phenomena that torment living creatures, that is, free from any and all suffering, in a state of perfect serenity. It does not makes sense to try to be "mean" with inanimate matter. There is no way to torture rocks by throwing them off cliffs, hammering them, etc. There is only one way to make matter suffer: by transforming it into a living being. It follows that, even from an objective point of view, we can find moral implications in reproduction, since it condemns matter to suffer needlessly in the form of a living being driven by afflictions and needs, only to later return to the same situation in which it initially found itself, without any meaning or benefit to it. From this perspective, we do not claim that reproduction is wrong, only that it is cruel. We affirm that, objectively, to live is to suffer. However, we do not draw subjective conclusions from this. Whether or not it is worth living is a different and subjective question, which refers to the value we attach to life. The immorality lies in the fact that the value of life is an issue that can only be considered by those who are already alive. When we reproduce, we impose our personal conclusions on someone who cannot even defend himself. Naturally, it is not a transcendental and absolute morality, but one relative to life. It can be understood as objective in the sense of referring to something that necessarily occurs, due to the very nature of life, due to the conditions imposed on subjective existence when inserted in the determinations of the objective world. Therefore, let us not confuse this observation with moral preaching about right and wrong, right and duty, etc. We are only concerned with objectively describing the physical consequences of the equally physical phenomenon of bringing into existence a new consciousness that will be haunted by the restlessness that moves life."

"Undoubtedly, the reproductive drive has deep biological roots, but this does not free us from guilt either. Of course, it was not us who invented life and its rules, but it was us who propagated it. We intentionally created a life in circumstances where we knew that suffering would be unavoidable. The impulse of aggression often leads us to commit crimes, but we do not fail to consider it reprehensible. It is something equally instinctive and natural, rooted in us as deeply as the sexual impulse. The difference is that, in the case of procreation, our aggression will materialize nine months later, as if planting a time bomb in the heart of nothingness."

"Man dares to allow himself to be cruel, when he's already committed, tranquilly and repeatedly, the crudest act of all: engendering, condemning beings that do not exist or suffer to the horrors of life."

"The unforgivable betrayal of philosophy: procreation."

"Best by far not to be born, and not to come up against these rocks of life, but, if you are born, is it next best to escape as it were from fire of fortune as quickly as possible."

"To procreate is to love the scourge – to seek to maintain and to augment it. They were right, those ancient philosophers who identified fire with the principle of the universe, and with desire, for desire burns, devours: annihilates: At once agent and destroyer of beings, it is somber, it is infernal by essence."

"I was alone in that cemetery overlooking the village when a pregnant woman came in. I left at once, in order not to look at this corpse-bearer at close range, nor to ruminate upon the contrast between an aggressive womb and the time-worn tombs-between a false promise and the end of all promises."

"When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered."

"I have said more than once that one can have a post-sexual vision of the world, the most desperate vision that is possible: the feeling of having invested everything in something that was not worth it. The extraordinary thing is that we are dealing with a reversible infinity. Sexuality is an immense imposture, a gigantic falsehood that invariably renews itself."

"The only reason why I flatter myself, is that I understood very early, before the age of twenty, that one should not procreate. My disgust towards marriage, family and all social conventions has its source in this. Crime is to transmit one's frailties to someone else, to force someone to experience the same things we are experiencing, to force someone to the Way of the Cross that may be worse than our own. I could never agree to give life to someone who inherits misfortunes and evil. All parents are irresponsible people, or murderers. Procreation should belong only to beasts. Pity makes you not want to be a "progenitor". This is the cruelest word I know of."

"The problem of responsibility would make sense only if we were asked for an opinion before our birth and if we agreed to be the ones we are."

"It is the stroke of midnight. I feel lonely in the face of despair stronger than me. And again I take refuge in the time before I was born."

"In her novel The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, Ursula K. le Guin describes a city where the good fortune of the citizens requires that an innocent child is tortured in a secret place (le Guin 1973). The child stands symbolically for the innocence of extreme sufferers. The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas are the people who deny the world. We will associate them with Buddhist monks in this paper, i.e., with childlessness and retreat. The metaphor suggests that individual happiness is ambivalent. The joy of the majority is at the cost of a suffering minority; one is not possible without the other. There is no doubt that the human suffering in this world is caused by procreation, but the relation is indirect. Parents participate in an immensely complex system of interactions and probabilities. Often a contingent event decides who becomes a victim. As a consequence, participants deny the responsibility for the results of the system – a phenomenon which is also known in the context of structural violence (Galtung 1969). If the human race were a sympathetic race, it could walk away from Omelas."

"Things change in an instant. Two things, however, are certain. Everyone will suffer. And everyone will die. Back to where we came from. Knowing this, and understanding full well that any particular life embodies the potential for experiencing extreme pain and unhappiness unceasing in some cases is procreation really worth the risk?"

"When someone (including philosophers) defends the alleged beauty of "having children", they refer to the pleasure of "seeing them grow up": first as children, then adolescents, then graduated and independent adults (this happens not only in wealthy classes but also, in part, in more modest ones). However, it is strange that, when they speak about children, they inexplicably stop at this point and never refer to their decline, their aging, or their decay; perhaps because they think they will not be there to contemplate this decline. The parents prefer not to see the end of this process, as if the child vanished into thin air. The residual aspect of parenthood is omitted; only the flourishing aspects of the child are visualized. The death of the child-residue is denied any visibility. The consummation of the processes is concealed as something dirty and indecent, not worthy to be shown."

"It is very curious that it is sometimes considered cruel or inhumane to raise the issue of the ethics of procreation, as if this showed a rejection of the unborn children, a kind of hatred for their lives. This is a total deformation of the intentions of an ethical reflection on procreation. On the contrary, this reflection is motivated by a deep concern for the possible children, due to the risk of their emergence being the consequence of a thoughtless, constraining and aggressive act towards small defenseless beings, on whom one thinks to have full right to plan everything about their lives to our full desire and satisfaction. A great part of the revolt that awakens in the adult world due to the simple mention of this issue indicates that the parents obtain a great pleasure in the procreative act, and react – sometimes angrily – against those who question this powerful source of pleasure, and consequently the immense power over the one who is going to be born. This total power over another life is intensely seductive and no one wants to give it up. But in the ethical reflection, whatever the subject matter is, it is never an issue of evaluating only the satisfaction we get from our actions, but of pondering whether what we do is right or not, whether the power we can accumulate over more defenseless beings is or is not ethically justified."

"The "eternal gratitude" is present not only in the early stages of life, but throughout children's long dependence upon their parents during the first ten years of life — in which they are even objects of exhibition — and in the harsh period of adolescence, in which children are endlessly treated as "ungrateful", as if they were never able to repay their immense debt; everything that is bought for them, for their future, their studies, all those things that the child never asked for, which are part of an affective and economic investment of the parents, is endlessly and for long and hard years, presented as proof of sacrifice and love, as an object of eternal gratitude, never fully repaid by the ungrateful children. The position of parenthood constitutes a powerful mechanism of domination in which even the physical violence of punishments and beatings is justified in favor of the never-requested raising of that being who was thrown into the world, with parents trying to build protections so that their child is not destroyed by the immense gift they just received."

"Of course, the possibility of the newborn not having the strength to endure the life struggle is just a possibility, not a necessity. However, the point is that its mere possibility is enough for moral imputation. There are no strong causal relations between methods of education and raising of children to shape their destinies in life. As they say, a child is "a lottery". The precautions that progenitors take to avoid certain risks for their children could be precisely the ones that expose them to greater danger. The many human lives that end catastrophically seem to illustrate the very high price to be paid in an attempt to ethically justify the "gamble" of procreation, even if made in the most serious way by the sensitive procreator. However, it is important that even when none of these catastrophes occurs, the success of the newborn in life does not exempt the progenitors from the moral responsibility of having put him at risk of falling victim to one of these calamities. Moreover, even for the child who has "won" the gamble, his "success" will remain forever and indefinitely connected to the unilateral nature of the procreative act. The gamble will have been won, but this will never be the child's own bet. The newborn may get lucky and "win the gamble", but he was never in a position to refuse to enter into the competition."

"Some children go on crying until they are quite old, later finding other forms of protest. A small child is a hive of explosive and irresistible needs, aspirations and desires. There is nothing a child says more than: “I want, I want, I want”. Children are constantly torn by desires they are now forced to manage in order to endure the life that was asymmetrically imposed on them, and to which they are compelled to live. The progenitors will deny their children most of what their offspring believe they must have, by telling them that the world does not revolve around their wants, ironically as these same parents endowed their children with bodies full of insatiable desires. Children constantly fall prey to their desires, especially under the multiple forms of painful expectations, discouragements and boredom, which require their parents to shield their offspring from the mortal danger of the being given at birth. This is, of course, the role of toys and of the entire paraphernalia of objects that parents are now compelled to put between their small children and the terminal being they have imposed on them. In the streets and in shopping malls, we see small children crying loudly, asking for this or that, being dragged away by irritated, placid or excessively attentive parents, or indifferent ones, who have neither the sensibility nor the patience to attend to their children’s complaints, unhearing and absentminded, as if the small ones’ demands were irrelevant and did not deserve attention. One may say that a few minutes later the child will be smiling or laughing again; but note that this happens just for a while when he finds some type of distraction, something that diverts his attention for a short period of time."

"Man's greatest crime on earth is the fatal fact of birth."

"In this perspective, reproduction makes us the only ones responsible for creating suffering in the world. Without us, there would be no pain. But there is, and it's our fault. Objectively, pain is not a bad thing, but it is subjectively. We, as living beings, have pain as the supreme reference point for everything that is undesirable. Our objective, biological nature imposes this condition on us. Just as pleasure is good, pain is bad - whether physical, emotional or psychological. Let the relativists stand up, with their crazy theories about the “arbitrariness” of the issue: we would like to see them believe this while we insert spikes under their nails. The presence of pain as something positively undesirable is an essential requirement for life to be sustainable, it is a condition imposed objectively on the survival machines that we are. Pain makes us efficient organisms, and without it we would not function properly, we would just die painlessly for ignoring the dangers that surround us. This means that when we make all the pain that exists on earth appear out of nothingness, when we put matter in the only condition in which it can suffer, that is, when we transform it into a living being, we become positively evil, responsible for the dissemination of suffering. Thus, intentional reproduction makes us perverse and immoral beings, and this in a purely objective sense, because it is a universally valid judgment, whatever the circumstances in which we find ourselves. As long as there is pain in existence, as long as life involves suffering, the act of reproducing means collaborating with its growth, perpetuating this misfortune, actively endeavoring to make the world a more painful and pitiful place."

"Obviously, we have the freedom to be as evil and selfish as we want, but we cannot deny that we are guilty of being so; there is no way to be innocent of this accusation. Originally, that life did not exist, never existed, and would have remained non-existent, if only we did not have the admirable idea of ​​ejaculating in a womb and making it appear out of nothingness to then claim that their suffering "is not our problem", that we are not responsible because it is “natural”. Now, even a theologian could not take such a lame excuse seriously. The objection that procreation does not necessarily make us evil because suffering occurs in life in a natural and inevitable way is not justified because, although we cannot change life's intimate constitution, we have the choice to reproduce or not. He who is born, on the contrary, cannot choose whether to come into the world or not, just as we had no choice regarding our own birth. We may or may not have children. However, when we decide to have them, this choice makes us positively evil, gratuitously cruel. We, as an insomnia of matter, harm that which sleeps deeply only to share our lack of sleep, to feel less bored with our embarrassingly futile existences."

"Very good and deep is the thought: "Nobody would accept life as a gift if they could decide." Seneca was the one who said it and I am in agreement with him. Imagine a preexistent soul, in all its tranquility, which is informed of what the life of man entails and the evils to which they are subject – it would refuse to enter a body."

"As long as they have the wish to kill, they will not lose the lust to procreate."

"The immorality of procreation praised as conscious is this: here the crime of making a man, to introduce more evil and pain in the world is not made unconsciously in ecstasy and drama in the darkness of copulation, but is coolly premeditated, people then are no longer cautious and repeat the act until they reach the goal. But there is something even worse: artificial procreation, semen ice, where without the manipulator and the belly person horrified by what they do, lacks even the delight that is some extenuating circumstance."

"Oh, the suppliers of live meat to furnaces of pain!"

"After the misfortune of being born, I do not know any greater than giving birth."

"We should do what we can to minimize the suffering of those animals already in existence, but we should also consider ending the breeding of captive animals. This will ensure that fewer suffering sentient beings are created, thus decreasing the overall amount of suffering."

"Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?"

"What sin have you committed to be born, what crime to exist?"

"Everything is wonderfully clear if we admit that birth is a disastrous or at least an inopportune event; but if we think otherwise, we must resign ourselves to the unintelligible, or else cheat like everyone else."

"If it is true that by death we once more become what we were before being, would it not have been better to abide by that pure possibility, not to stir from it? What use was this detour, when we might have remained forever in an unrealized plenitude?"

"That faint light in each of us which dates back to before our birth, to before all births, is what must be protected if we want to rejoin that remote glory from which we shall never know why we were separated."

"Satan, unable by his very nature to take possession of a spiritual element enclosed in the body, can at most delay its release from the body. This process of delaying is done by procreation: "All flesh comes out of copulation. That is why it is impure.""