Antinatalism

"What shall I write ...? If I say that is good, it would be a lie. If I express sorrow, it would be violence. ... I would only say and wish that you learn to control yours senses."

"Answer without flinching: if there existed a solution that could abolish the totality of all evils inflicted on disastrous humanity, if it was possible, by some simple remedy, incredibly cheap, immediately accessible, scrupulously inoffensive, of absolute and definitive efficiency, to stop all distress, all cries, all cries of pain, all pathologies, all protests of ill-being, all despair, all cataclysms, all anxiety, all unhappiness, in short all tortures afflicting the human species, would you have the macabre stupidity to reject such a remedy, to disdain such a miracle cure? No, that goes without saying. Well this solution does exist, and the mysterious is thereby delivered to us: it consists simply, in its saintly simplicity, to not procreate."

"Another argument is often made by the irresponsible ones who breed us – that it is an act of "leaving a trace" – strange impulse! Let us immediately observe that from an ethological point of view this is akin to the attitude many mammals have to leave droppings on the ground to mark their path or territory. The dog urinating against a lamp post also leaves a trace, one however which, unlike the baby, benefits from the privilege of not having to endure the grueling stresses of life."

"If it was otherwise, if procreation was not the result of the most scandalous narcissism, if our odious parents were really moved by some generosity, prospective adoption candidates would be incredibly more numerous than the millions of children who wait, right now, to be adopted! But talk about adoption and you'll see a big frown of "yes-but-not-for-me" form on their face, greedy to possess a prey coming entirely from their bodies. "Orphans? Someone else's baby? Come on, get scientists to help vanquish my infertility instead!""

"I am able to find meaning in my life, but I do not feel entitled to impose it to anyone."

"Didn't Conrad, in his great novel "Heart of Darkness", had this feeling of deathbed despair, when he mentions Kurz's doubtful fight with death – fight without confidence? Same Conrad, who put in one of his novels Calderon's words, that the biggest misfortune of man is to be born, as a tagline? This coincides with your repeatedly spoken thesis, that the biggest iniquity is to bring children to life, because giving them birth is sentencing them to death. We are pulling them out from the nothingness, from the state of complete unconsciousness into reality – and then we command them to undergo the agony of death, which they wouldn't have to experience without being alive in the first place."

"There are two most conscious actions that man can act upon: suicide and desisting procreation."

"For instance, people call me a pessimist; and if it is pessimism to think, with Sophocles, that's not to have been born is best,' then I do not reject the designation."

"It therefore seems there are at least two prima facie duties that push towards making procreative acts wrong overall: our prima facie duty to prevent pain and our prima facie duty not to seriously affect someone else without his prior consent."

"I believe it is morally wrong to cause avoidable suffering to other people. This belief gives rise to two different objections to human reproduction. On the one hand, since all human beings suffer at some point in their lives, every parent who could have declined to procreate is to blame. On the other hand, since potential parents cannot guarantee that the lives of their children will be better than non-existence, they can also be rightfully accused of gambling on other people's lives, whatever the outcome. Because of the uncertainties of human life, anybody's children can end up arguing that it would have been better for them not to have been born at all. The probability of this outcome does not necessarily matter. It is enough that the possibility is real, which it always is."

"Wouldn't it be nice to have a kid, to have this fresh, clean slate, which we could fill, and a little clean spirit, totally, you know, innocent, and to fill it with good ideas. Yeah, yeah, how about this? If you're so f#####g altruistic, why don't you leave the little clean spirit wherever it is right now? Ok? Horrible act, childbirth. It's a nightmare. Bringing – I would never bring a kid to this f#####g planet."

"The mother instinct is something of which I am completely devoid. I explain it like this to myself: life is a vale of tears and all human beings are miserable creatures, so I cannot take the responsibility for bringing yet another unhappy creature into the world."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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!"

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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?"

"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.""

"The fruit forbidden to our forefathers was nothing but the pleasures of a carnal intercourse, and Adam gave this fruit to his wife." In fact, "it is not because of a good God that flowers bloom and cereal produces seeds, and people and animals multiply, but this is because of an evil god."

"Regarding sexual intercourse, their position was that any form of intercourse was acceptable (and, according to some, celebrated), so long as it did not result in procreation."

"Cathars believed the whole of humanity, and each man individually, is the children of Satan. Why, then, serve their reproduction, if not for the duplication of suffering, and the triumph of Satan?"

"Nature knows nothing about right and wrong, good and evil, pleasure and pain; she simply acts. She creates a beautiful woman, and places a cancer on her cheek. She may create an idealist, and kill him with a germ. She creates a fine mind, and then burdens it with a deformed body. And she will create a fine body, apparently for no use whatever. She may destroy the most wonderful life when its work has just commenced. She may scatter tubercular germs broadcast throughout the world. She seemingly works with no method, plan or purpose. She knows no mercy nor goodness. Nothing is so cruel and abandoned as Nature. To call her tender or charitable is a travesty upon words and a stultification of intellect. No one can suggest these obvious facts without being told that he is not competent to judge Nature and the God behind Nature. If we must not judge God as evil, then we cannot judge God as good. In all the other affairs of life, man never hesitates to classify and judge, but when it comes to passing on life, and the responsibility of life, he is told that it must be good, although the opinion beggars reason and intelligence and is a denial of both. Emotionally, I shall no doubt act as others do to the last moment of my existence. With my last breath I shall probably try to draw another, but, intellectually, I am satisfied that life is a serious burden, which no thinking, humane person would wantonly inflict on some one else."

"To spare you all that I have seen, The losses I have sustained, I withstood the human impulse within."

"Celebrating a birthday is nothing but celebration because of a sinister farce that our parents arranged for us by bringing us to the world."

"No, I would not like it if there was no end, it is literally something we can influence: a peaceful end to humanity. Let no one – this is the first thing I wish – become a parent anymore. It does not hurt the unborn, and saves them a lot of trouble."

"To those, on the other hand, who under a pious cloak blaspheme by their continence both the creation and the holy Creator, the almighty, only God, and teach that one must reject marriage and begetting of children, and should not bring others in their place to live in this wretched world, nor give any sustenance to death , our reply is as follows."

"For mortals it is better not to be born than to be born; Children I bring to birth with bitter pains; And then when I have borne them they lack understanding. In vain I groan, that I must look on wicked offspring. While I lose the good. If the good survive, My wretched heart is melted by alarm. What is this goodness then? Is it not enough That I should care for one alone And bear the pain for this one soul?" And further to the same effect, "So now I think and have long so thought Man ought never children to beget, Seeing into what agonies we are born." But in the following verses he clearly attributes the cause of evil to the primal origins, when he speaks as follows: "O thou who art born for misfortune and disaster, thou art born a man, and thine unhappy life thou didst receive from the place where the air of heaven, which gives breath to mortals, first began to give food for all. Complain not of thy mortal state, thou who art mortal." Again he puts the same idea in these words: "No mortal is content and happy Nor is any born free from sorrow."

"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."

"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."

"The whole earth, believe me, Philo, is cursed and polluted. A perpetual war is kindled amongst all living creatures. Necessity, hunger, want, stimulate the strong and courageous: Fear, anxiety, terror, agitate the weak and infirm. The first entrance into life gives anguish to the new-born infant and to its wretched parent: weakness, impotence, distress, attend each stage of that life: and 'tis at last finished in agony and horror."