Antinatalism

"Lack of capacity to give consent do not mean somebody can inflict any action to the person that lacks the capacity to give informed consent. For example, minor under age of consent deemed to lack the capacity to give consent, so any sexual contact with such minor is deemed rape unconditionally (statutory rape). Even though for example, medical treatment, vaccination, and compulsory education are inflicted without the informed consent of the child, such action is deemed to be (whether real or purported) best interest of the child to be justifiable. For procreation, the child neither given consent thereto nor have any interest to come into existence, although once came into existence, the child may have the interest to continue their existence."

"Born in horror and pain, I also live in horrible dread of the end, the exit. I'm caught in an incredible, inadmissible, infernal trap, between two frightful events."

"Two things are unacceptable: birth and death. I did not ask for them and I do not accept them."

"When life failed our expectations, when we gave up the creation of ourselves, when we sense that everything is in ruins then instead of going to the mortuary we lead the family and relatives to the place even more grave and kitschy place: to the maternity ward."

"What could be more obscene than a woman proudly carrying a future corpse in her belly?"

"Causing the birth of a child means abusing this child. At the mere idea that they could give life, every wise man thinks that he would prefer to die."

"How can anyone take seriously an insane idea that the world was created by a good God, and sign up under the most criminal of all imperatives: "be fruitful and multiply"?"

"Never, at any point in life, I could get rid of the notion that this type of ending to life, which brings death, is an absurdity, unendurable without the smokescreen of one or another myth, a delusion that goes beyond the boundaries of our biological being, which is a seasonal being, bounded by space and time, understood only in these categories, which doesn't signify that we must understand precisely this form of being as the existence and non-existence, reasonable, righteous, and the only one, just because it's necessary. Inevitability does not mean a wise solution. First of all, it deprives us of freedom. Since the earliest years of consciousness, we are determined, we know about it, at any time we are in danger, never safe. Does existence in the vastness of the universe have to be connected with constant risk, does it have to be like a house, where tenancy agreement can be terminated at any time; can't we think about existence based on more permanent foundations, less limited, having knowledge about something much wiser? These thoughts of a rational being are based on the common logic of thinking, they do not take into account another possibility, that being shouldn't be considered in the category of logic and necessity, but it can be considered in the categories of absurd, lack of logic and hostile necessity. The difficultly of accepting death does not have to result in an attachment to life, from a deficiency so great that a being already brought into existence, would like to live forever or not be born at all. However, this is not senseless thinking, on the contrary, it seems much more sensible than all this huge preparation for a short life. A rational being – it may seem so to us – should have the right to choose death, but should not be submitted to a determined death sentence, should not be a convict."

"You must not marry and have sons or daughters in this place."

"She asks, "How long shall men die?" Jesus answers, "As long as you women bear children". Writers like Julius Cassianus take this as an implicit injunction to defeat death by ceasing from procreation. Clement resorts to allegorical explanation. By "as long as women bear children" the Lord meant "as long as desires are active"."

"I'd also gone through an entire year of celibacy based on my feeling that lust was the direct cause of birth which was the direct cause of suffering and death and I had really no lie come to a point where I regarded lust as offensive and even cruel. "Pretty girls make graves", was my saying, whenever I'd had to turn my head around involuntarily to stare at the incomparable pretties of Indian Mexico."

"I will have to preach the only possible truth: The abolishing of death by extermination of birth. Life control. Put an end to human rebirth, by abstaining from sexual intercourse. Everybody stop breeding, or by method of-birth-control stop birth. At the same time, stop killing for sport or for eating living beings; they tremble at punishment and death too. Everybody live off vegetables and synthetic foods, causing no pain anywhere."

"Let us cease bestiality and go into the bright room of the mind realizing emptiness, and sit with the truth. And let no man be guilty, after this, Dec. 9 1954, of causing birth. – Let there be an end to birth, an end to life, and therefore an end to death. Let there be no more fairy tales and ghost stories around and about this. I don't advocate that everybody die, I only say everybody finish your lives in purity and solitude and gentleness and realization of the truth and be not the cause of any further birth and turning of the black wheel of death."

"I wouldn't have come had I had my say, Nor would I leave Here if I had my way; Ah, nothing better in this world could be Than not to come, nor be, not go away."

"Since Heaven increases nothing but our pain, And gives naught that it takes not back again, The unborn ne'er would hither come if they But knew what we at Fortune's hands sustain."

"A man is born in sin, he enters this world by means of a crime, his existence is a crime – and procreation is the fall."

"I give thanks to God that no living being owes me existence."

"That is what Christianity is for – which straightaway bars the way to procreation. This means: stop!"

"Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth — look at the dying man’s struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment."

"Phasing out the human race by voluntarily ceasing to breed will allow Earth's biosphere to return to good health. Crowded conditions and resource shortages will improve as we become less dense."

"First, the damp, dark depths and a lonely embryo in a warm interior. He does not yet know that he has been betrayed, that the sentence has been given. In it, all his future illusions and defeats. For now he is still in the garden, beyond consciousness, but they will pull him out and his excruciating screaming will not help. Nobody will take pity on him here because no one has received pity. First, only as a body, unconscious of itself, but unfortunately, it cannot remain that way. If only this body could see what awaits it! Perfidy lies in the fact that it can't! The body is not allowed to, because the sentence must be executed. The unspeakable horror of birth in which is already lying, curled up, the horror of life. This horror will then crawl out in all directions only to end up in a ditch, in a gutter, in a suburban railway car, on an icy sheet of a hospital bed or in warm sheets, among close ones, which are always too far away to tell them about themselves. If such is the beginning, what is to be expected at the end? Then, when they snatch him from inside, despite screams and pleas. When they wash the blood from their hands, like they would after murder. Wandering begins, to meet someone, to get somewhere. Both are impossible, but this impossibility can only be seen after a while, so again it goes back to a few illusions and comforts, which make the boredom and monotony of the road more pleasant. All these gusts, elation, despair of awakened senses. And this is just a short leash of desires and vents. And this is just a string of habits that will bind also many others after him. Dreams, illusions, fantasies, swarms of them, they run, to finally fall from exhaustion anywhere, feeling muck on the face, debris, sticky mud puddles, and finally a massive stench of dirt, exploding in the nostrils."

"Oh, the greatest of torments Embrace towards the dawn The flower of death to bloom! Oh, the greatest of torments To sow the flower in the grave Bloom from your own womb Oh, the greatest of torments To reproduce the moans To add one more moan One, the special one What tugs the mother spirit By the harshest of torments Oh, the greatest of punishments To feed the old hunger for life By giving them our blood To a huge pile of death Fuming with eternal heat Throw more wood! Oh, these hours will come, When the mother's pain rises, It will face the guilt of life Like earth replete with births And will ask in a reckoning voice: Where's your fruit? Where's your child? Oh, this hour will come, What starts to beat in the twilights, Into rust-coloured bronze of centuries When these wombs close Like barren land Which give birth to their cross today."

"One more martyr! Go back from where you came from, child There are enough unfortunate ones in the world without you, Go back, close your eyes, do not look at the world, Push away your mother's breasts and do not demand life."

"You'll also find delight! – it's not worth being born for it, It's like a night star, it will be flashing and setting, And it will only rise so that the bloody suffering, Will tear your heart and soul even harder. Such delight isn't worth the name of delight. And this world won't give you other one."

"Forgive me your birth in this strange land. I wanted your infant kisses, your fists clasped round my neck. I craved you, though you were born in the wake of my illness, my dim prognosis. I was selfish: I willed you this woe, this world. You inherited exile for my sake."

"I'll be frank. I've always felt that it's horrible to send a person into the world who didn't ask to be there. . . . Look around you. Of all the people you see, no one is here by his own wish. Of course, what I just said is the most banal truth there is. So banal, and so basic, that we've stopped seeing it and hearing it. . . . Everyone jabbers about human rights. What a joke! Your existence isn't founded on any right. They don't even allow you to end your life by your own choice, these defenders of human rights. . . . Look at them all! Look! At least half the people you are seeing are ugly. Being ugly–is that one of the human rights too? And do you know what it is to carry your ugliness with you through your whole life? With not a moment of relief? Or your sex? You never chose that. Or the color of your eyes? Or your era on earth? Or your country? Or your mother? None of the things that matter. The rights a person can have involve only pointless things, for which there is no reason to fight or to write great declarations! You're here as you are because I was weak. That was my fault. Forgive me."

"Not by violent means (murder, war and the like), but peacefully, let mankind disappear from our globe."

"I mourn the creatures you bring into the world who could not defend themselves when you created them, who otherwise would have protested out loud against your action. Since it all boils down to suffering and destruction."

"Never to have procreated – this be your consolation when you die."

"I beget you (says such a nurturer) to have the pleasure of seeing what is within you and what is not. Doing this I am forcing upon you a lot of suffering and, at last, the nasty catastrophe of dying."

"Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don't have any kids yourself."

"All of us are brought into existence, without our consent, and over the course of our lives, we are acquainted with a multitude of goods. Unfortunately, there is a limit to the amount of good each of us will have in our lives. Eventually, each of us will die and we will be permanently cut off from the prospect of any further good. Existence, viewed in this way, seems to be a cruel joke."

"Perhaps the day will never come when people realize that moral patients like us should cease to exist. It would be an unconscionable tragedy if we never do. I remain optimistic, however. Some very interesting arguments have recently been advanced in support of the conclusion that it is always worse for a person to live than not. I suspect that many more will follow. Until the day that individuals begin to take non-procreation seriously on a widespread scale, perhaps all we can do is follow Schopenhauer: "The conviction that the world, and therefore man too, is something which really ought not to exist is in fact calculated to instil in us indulgence towards one another: for what can be expected of beings placed in such a situation as we are? From this point of view one might indeed consider that the appropriate form of address between man and man ought to be, not monsieur, sir, but fellow sufferer, compagnon de misères. However strange this may sound it corresponds to the nature of the case, makes us see other men in a true light and reminds us of what are the most necessary of all things: tolerance, patience, forbearance and charity, which each of us needs and which each of us therefore owes." (On the Sufferings of the World)"

"Birth seems to me so sorry and squalid an accident . . . if fathers and mothers took thought before bringing children into this misery of a world, only the monsters among them would dare to go through with it."

"People aware of their own birth and death in this way are said not to be lacking. Not lacking in what? Not lacking in birth. They're acquainted with the births they've experienced through many lives and states of being in the past—so many that they're weary of it all, to the point where they don't want to take birth again. As for people who don't know, who don't have this awareness, they feel that they're lacking. They want to take birth again and so they keep on creating birth over and over again. As for those who do have awareness, they've had enough. They're smart enough. They won't give rise to any more births or states of being. Whatever is good, they keep within themselves, like putting a ripe mango seed in a showcase to look at, or peeling off its hard outer shell and then putting it in a storeroom. No one will be able to plant it again, and we can take it out for a look whenever we want."

"When parents warn their children that the world is full of selfish people who want to take advantage of them and who will treat them unfairly, they do the same thing as warning them that there are other people in the world like the parents themselves. It is tantamount to informing them that, even with a world full of people like that, exploitative and unjust, and even with life being very difficult, the parents (who knew all this) forced their children into being, even though it was avoidable."

"Considering that there is no guarantee that the child will be "happy," that any effort made towards this goal can be in vain, that if the child did not exist then this problem would not exist, and that such problem arose because the child was forced to be born for the luxury of his parents—even though it was avoidable—from all this follows that a responsible and sensitive "procreator" (or rather a responsible pre-procreator) would stop right there, precisely at "pre.""

"The gamble, in this case, has put at risk another innocent, without power, knowledge and responsibility; the gamble was unnecessary and could have been avoided; if it had been avoided, it would not harm this innocent, and it was not avoided because we are talking about a compulsive gambler."

"The new being (the child) is unknown, and some possibilities available to them are terrible and devastating. One of these possibilities is a painful process of suicide in which the individual experiences, sometimes for years, various types of suffering, until they effectively get rid of everything. Notice that when we decide to have a child, we have no way of being sure that they will not go through this. The only thing parents need to do to expose their child to such a possibility is to have the child."

"If the extreme case of the suicide or the particularly pessimistic group is not considered by you to be a legitimate or real risk, then for the purposes of this presentation, these examples can be replaced by other cases. For example, the case of people who struggle with serious existential difficulties (like the ones commonly treated by psychoanalysts). Or the case of people with common health problems: we currently have a list of more than 7000 diseases that affect our physical and mental health, and which can drastically change the quality of our lives, even very suddenly. Not to mention, of course, the natural process of aging and fatigue to which we are all subjected. Or yet, the case of people who do not look for professional help, but in order to continue living or surviving they need to intoxicate themselves, change their state of consciousness with legal or illegal drugs, create psychosis, etc. Anyway, even for one who is not a tormented suicide, life does not seem to be so easy. Sometimes an individual needs years of therapy in order to become minimally stable. And what if the new being, our child, find themselves at some moment in such a condition? Notice then how a common decision, whose habit is considered noble, can bring an immense suffering. It is then that the true non-triviality of this decision begins to appear, as well as how important (or even necessary) it is to have a greater reflection and sensitivity in this subject. But always from the perspective of the new being, and not only from our perspective as prospective parents."

"Certainly there are innumerable risks in procreation. But the real problem is not simply that there are risks, but that these risks extend to the child, not being limited only to the father and mother. The decision, when taken in favor of procreation, exceeds the parties who have taken the decision, and thus brings implications to a necessarily innocent being, who did not actively participate in this process that would affect them. A parent who is truly committed to their child's well-being would not create these possibilities, nor put them in risky situations, nor bring about something that could be devastating to the child."

"If we procreate, we put the child in a situation of innumerable risks and without guarantees for their well-being. If we do not procreate, we do not put them at risk and at the same time we do not deprive them of anything, because they never came into being, they never came to exist, and thus they will never miss anything."

"Being asked for what purpose he thought men were born, he laughingly replied: To realize how much better it were not to be born."

"In travail man is born; His birth too oft the cause of death, And with his earliest breath He pain and torment feels: e'en from the first, His parents fondly strive To comfort him in his distress; And if he lives and grows, They struggle hard, as best they may, With pleasant words and deeds to cheer him up, And seek with kindly care, To strengthen him his cruel lot to bear. This is the best that they can do For the poor child, however fond and true. But wherefore give him life? Why bring him up at all, If be all? If life is nought but pain and care, Why, why should we the burden bear?"

"Perhaps in every state beneath the sun, Or high, or low, in cradle or in stall, The day of birth is fatal to us all."

"It were more reasonable that you [Nature] made happiness a necessity; or this being impossible, it were better not to bring men into the world."

"Thus I reply to you [Nature]. I am well aware you did not make the world for the service of men. It were easier to believe that you made it expressly as a place of torment for them. But tell me: why am I here at all? Did I ask to come into the world? Or am I here unnaturally, contrary to your will? If however, you yourself have placed me here, without giving me the power of acceptance or refusal of this gift of life, ought you not as far as possible to try and make me happy, or at least preserve me from the evils and dangers, which render my sojourn a painful one? And what I say of myself, I say of the whole human race, and of every living creature."

"As soon as the child is born, the mother who has just brought him into the world must console him, quiet his crying, and lighten the burden of the existence she has given him. And one of the principal duties of good parents in the childhood and early youth of their children is to comfort them, to encourage them to live, because sorrows and ills and passions are at that age much heavier than they are to those who through long experience, or simply because they have lived longer, are used to suffering. And in truth it is only fitting that the good father and the good mother, in trying to console their children, correct as best they can, and ease, the damage they have done by procreating them. Good God! Why then is man born? And why does he procreate? To console those he has given birth to for having been born?"

"Perhaps the greatest strike against philosophical pessimism is that its only theme is human suffering. This is the last item on the list of our species' obsessions and detracts from everything that matters to us, such as the Good, the Beautiful, and a Sparkling Clean Toilet Bowl. For the pessimist, everything considered in isolation from human suffering or any cognition that does not have as its motive the origins, nature, and elimination of human suffering is at base recreational, whether it takes the form of conceptual probing or physical action in the world—for example, delving into game theory or traveling in outer space, respectively. And by "human suffering," the pessimist is not thinking of particular sufferings and their relief, but of suffering itself. Remedies may be discovered for certain diseases and sociopolitical barbarities may be amended. But these are only stopgaps. Human suffering will remain insoluble as long as human beings exist. The one truly effective solution for suffering is that spoken of in Zapffe’s "Last Messiah." It may not be a welcome solution for a stopgaps world, but it would forever put an end to suffering, should we ever care to do so. The pessimist's credo, or one of them, is that nonexistence never hurt anyone and existence hurts everyone. Although our selves may be illusory creations of consciousness, our pain is nonetheless real."

"As their numbers tapered off, these dead-enders of our species could be the most privileged individuals in history and share with one another material comforts once held in trust only for the well-born or moneygetting classes of the world. Since personal economic gain would be passé as a motive for the new humanity, there would be only one defensible incitement to work: to see one another through to the finish, a project that would keep everyone busy and not just staring into space while they waited for the end. There might even be bright smiles exchanged among these selfless benefactors of those who would never be forced to exist."