Antinatalism
308 quotes
Biography
Antinatalism or anti-natalism is the philosophical value judgment that procreation is unethical or unjustifiable. Antinatalists thus argue that humans should abstain from making children.
"Among the people who are created, there are always some who will have to suffer unspeakably. This fact, having been considered not only by Schopenhauer and other so-called pessimists, should influence anyone prepared to have a closer look only – and especially – at the 20th century to philosophize. Thus far, nobody has succeeded in demonstrating that the inconceivable, though immeasurable suffering inflicted upon human beings, in Auschwitz and elsewhere throughout time and space, can be compensated by the former or future happiness of the sufferers or of others."
"Only by means of relative or absolute childlessness, resulting in mankind's ebbing away, could happen what might be named – borrowing from the Greek myth – Sisyphus's revolt. He would give up his work, not in order to commit suicide but rather by refraining from having children who otherwise would have taken his spot. In such a way that at some point in time there would be no one in the rock's path which would eventually roll out. In terms of the Asian primordial decision: by means of abstention from procreation, the wheel of suffering would be deprived of its impetus until it comes to a standstill."
"Although there are many answers to the question of how people should live, few thinkers have wondered about whether it is really moral to create people. Antinatalism undermines what seems obvious: that people should be begotten and born."
"By sterilising animals, we can free them from being slaves to their instincts and from bringing more and more captive animals into the cycle of being born, contracting parasites, ageing, falling ill and dying; eating and being eaten."
"Whoever procreates is a selfish ego-producer. On the other hand, whoever decides to adopt has the opportunity to show what true altruism is."
"Without God, clearly, one needs no theodicy. That is to say, there is no longer any point in enquiring into such matters as why God has permitted so much suffering or whether – if the creation of no other world than this deeply imperfect one were possible – He would have done better to forgo Creation of world and Man altogether. But modernity rid itself of the desire for a theodicy without seeing that, by doing this, it burdened itself with the obligation to provide an anthropodicy in this latter's stead. This anthropodicy takes the form of the parallel but modified question: how can it be justified, in the face of so much suffering undergone in the past, being experienced in the present, and to be expected in the future, that human beings beget more human beings?"
"My father has perpetrated this crime against me; I am guilty of none."
"The lizard's ancestors are the cause of its being hunted."
"To beget is to increase the sum of evil."
"Whenever I reflect, my reflecting upon what I suffer only rouses me to blame him that begot me. And I gave peace to my children, for they are in the bliss of nonexistence which surpasses all the pleasures of this world. Had they come to life, they would have endured a misery casting them to destruction in trackless wildernesses."
"All human actions are nothing more than attempts to heal the mistake of their existence."
"My wife and I had not brought any children into this world, instead we had adopted. But having your own children is not a beautiful thing. Maybe I am wrong, maybe I am too hard. But I think I'm not doin' someone a big favour by giving him life."
"And what should I pray about? I ain't afraid of the next world; it can't be worse than this one; and in this world prayers don't cut much ice. I prayed so hard not to have a child - but I did and all. I prayed that the child might be able to stay with me - and it had to go to the Institute. I prayed that there it might stay alive - and it took and died."
"Birth is the driving wheel of all ills."
"But I am aware of some that murmur: What, say they, if all men should abstain from all sexual intercourse, whence will the human race exist? Would that all would this, only in "charity out of a pure heart, and good conscience, and faith unfeigned"; much more speedily would the City of God be filled, and the end of the world hastened."
"I think babies cry when they're born because they are born with the knowledge of all the terrible shit that’s gonna happen to them. That's why I never had kids. Every life is a death sentence. We just forget it later in life, like dreams we lose the second we wake up. Whether we worry about it or not, the shit's still going to fly."
"Miss Barnes sees life and the perpetuation of life as a mistake; indeed, the mistake is to be alive, and then by procreation, to compound that error and produce more tragedy and pain."
"Because of its emphasis upon human bestiality and the need for mankind not to take the world seriously and to abstain from procreation, the thought of Djuna Barnes, if we wish to label it in any systematic way, would have to be called Saturninian Christian in character."
"Homosexuality seems hardly the issue, for Nightwood neither defends nor condemns it, except in one oblique way. Given that life is suffering, the greatest crime would be procreation, which seems to give homosexuality the edge as a preferred lifestyle, since it promotes the extinction of the human species."
"Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave-digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries."
"No," he replied, when I asked him if he had ever wanted children, "that's one thing I'm proud of."
"Beckett ... targets parents as irresponsible criminals although, of course, in life courtesy prevented him from expressing his real feelings. Hamm denounces his parents in Endgame as "accursed progenitors" and Molloy is bitterly unable to forgive his mother for bringing him into the world. In private I knew Beckett to express a passive anger at those who insisted on having families."
"Creating new people, by having babies, is so much a part of human life that it is rarely thought even to require a justification. Indeed, most people do not even think about whether they should or should not make a baby. They just make one. In other words, procreation is usually the consequence of sex rather than the result of a decision to bring people into existence. Those who do indeed decide to have a child might do so for any number of reasons, but among these reasons cannot be the interests of the potential child. One can never have a child for that child's sake."
"It is curious that while good people go to great lengths to spare their children from suffering, few of them seem to notice that the one (and only) guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring those children into existence in the first place."
"Assuming that each couple has three children, an original pair's cumulative descendants over ten generations amount to 88,572 people. That constitutes a lot of pointless, avoidable suffering. To be sure, full responsibility for it all does not lie with the original couple because each new generation faces the choice of whether to continue that line of descendants. Nevertheless, they bear some responsibility for the generations that ensue. If one does not desist from having children, one can hardly expect one's descendants to do so."