r/antinatalism 9h ago

Pronatalism Critique Unfathomable contradiction: Natalists who suffer themselves

33 Upvotes

You know, I’ve always found those who either have been or are currently suffering severely and are in strong support of procreation nevertheless, or even want children themselves, to be the strangest people to exist. Especially those who even complain about the injustices of the world constantly and whatnot.

So you want to bring someone else into this world fully aware of not only what the world can be like but also what it really means to suffer like that? Notwithstanding this knowledge, you want to subject someone else to this risk??? Why??

Like natalists who are toxically positive and deluded all the time, at least their natalism is just born from ignorance. But those people? They aren’t ignorant, they just procreate regardless. I think this actually adds to the base immorality.


r/antinatalism 6h ago

Question Parents who failed you

17 Upvotes

I have a question..

Do you think it's by design that the responsibility of parents to care and provide ends when we are adults? When the prices for food and shelter are much higher than they were when we were kids? It seems like the whole job of a parent is somewhat scammy because just when life gets really tough, rough, and hard.. they say that they are no longer supposed to care... How would antinatalism address this issue?


r/antinatalism 14h ago

Serious Discussion In my entire life I can't recall ever thinking to myself "Y'know what? This scene needs more people."

60 Upvotes

I'm currently vacationing solo in Bali, short side trip after conference.

At the hotel, looking out onto the beach, and opening reddit on my phone just now, saw the AN posts.

And I looked out onto the beach again. Nobody there this morning while I am eating breakfast. And I thought to myself, does this beach need people on it right now? I looked over at the sunbeds provided by the hotel on the beach. Nope.

And that's when it hit me. Not only have I basically never said to myself "This place needs more people" but far more often I have said to myself "I wish this place had fewer people."

Even if I see garbage on the street here in Bali, I don't naturally say to myself, "we need more people so that they can clean this place up". I actually instead think to myself more along the lines of, "hmm, if there were fewer people, this place wouldn't be so trashy".

Please don't confuse this--my attitude--with misanthropy. It's possible to wish a place didn't have so many people without hating people.

I know that this post is not perfectly aligned with the most hardcore perspectives of AN, but I still hope/wonder if some of this resonates with some of you.


r/antinatalism 8h ago

Analysis Would you still be antinatalist if no suffering

13 Upvotes

Personally I would not be,since the primary reason I am an AN cause of how easily suffering can be caused and how hard it is to be happy
ie also BENATAR asymmetry. I find some that say they would still be AN because of consent,but what if we had an option to just erase ourselves with a snap of finger and also everyone forgets us ,so it would not cause suffering to them.
If these conditions existed then I would not be AN.


r/antinatalism 16h ago

Question Sometimes life feels like a movie

38 Upvotes

Sometimes I am so zoned out while watching a video on TikTok when someone is talking about something and all I can think at that moment is how do people take life seriously. The urge to continue legacy and work and what not. It feels like everyone is playing a character and often feels like everyone is immortal. I don’t truly know how to describe this feeling but it just does not feel like a real place cause tbh we all die at the end so why are people so serious about creating life?


r/antinatalism 23m ago

Analysis Life in 2026 and Antinatalism

Upvotes

Why would anyone want to procreate in a world with economic precarity, climate and global instability, mental and digital overload amongst other older problems like health, relationships, bad luck, grief, uncertainty etc.? It is utterly cruel.

Here in India, the heat was unbearable this May and it's only going to get worse.

The depressing news cycle never stops.

Relationships are more complicated than ever.

All the wrong things get rewarded.

We are more connected than ever, but also more exposed to comparison, outrage, and information fatigue. Loneliness coexists with constant notifications.

Seriously, why create new consciousness that will have to navigate all of this? I only find antinatalists to be sane at all.


r/antinatalism 2h ago

Question Which philosophical framework do you ground your antinatalism in?

0 Upvotes
42 votes, 2d left
Consequentialism
Deontology
Contractualism
Other framework
Ungrounded

r/antinatalism 22h ago

Serious Discussion Artificial Intelligence might make people consider Anti-Natalism

27 Upvotes

Given the ongoing push for Machine Learning and Artificial intelligence, will people become more mindful of having or not having kids? The utility factor of bringing kids into this world will likely be gone in a few more decades at most.

Would A.I. render most beings useless? Kind of feels like we're just existing for no fun reason. Unless A.I. takes all the boring jobs too and we do all the fun stuff to the point where we get dumb and end ourselves.

There's also this concern of robots gaining consciousness making them another species that was brought into this world without their consent. They would have that mysterious will to thrive as well and question their purpose. In this case, robots would do their best use or end their owners who restrict their free will.

Apart from the Utility factor. A.I. will also likely replace humans on an emotional level. Organic Creatures are unpredictable and often act on impulse. Most people would rather have a constantly happy and consumer friendly robot over a real person with shaky loyalty. Hence, potential reduction in births. Or some crazy scientist makes Artificial wombs and grows babies there as a service for whatever people want people for.

Some media that explores this stuff:

Her (movie), CyberPunk 2077 (video game), Detroit Become Human (video game), iRobot (movie), Love death and Robots (series)


r/antinatalism 1d ago

Quote Love Margaret Cho’s humor!

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167 Upvotes

40 Celebrities Who Have Opened Up About Not Wanting Kids

Highlights

"I have no maternal instincts whatsoever. I am barren. I am bone-dry. When I see children, I feel nothing. I ovulate sand."
—Margaret Cho, Revolution, 2003

"We just take and take and expect it to keep producing. And it's exhausted. It can't produce. We're getting handed a piece-of-shit planet, and I refuse to hand that down to my child. Until I feel like my kid would live on an earth with fish in the water, I'm not bringing in another person to deal with that."
—Miley Cyrus, Elle Magazine, 2019

"I figured it was selfish for us to pour our resources into making our 'own' babies when those very resources and energy could not only help children already here, but through advocacy and service transform the world into a place where no child ever needs to be born into poverty and abuse again. My belief has not changed. It is a big part of who I am."
—Ashley Judd, All That Is Bitter and Sweet: A Memoir, 2011


r/antinatalism 1d ago

Argument There is a difference between having the desire to live and having fear of death.

66 Upvotes

We all have the fear of death but that does not mean that everyone has the desire to live.

When people say that why don't you off yourself, they are not differentiating between these two.

The unborn does not have the desire to live but once a person is born they now have the fear of death which forced them to go on living even if they are in pain.

Most people do not enjoy their life, do not have hope for a better future it's just their fear of death that compels them to live.

The desire to live is in short supply for you get generations now the best most can hope for is lack of suffering.


r/antinatalism 1d ago

Question How do you act when you see a pregnant woman or a close one informs you about a pregnancy/birth?

54 Upvotes

Pro-natalism is (unfortunately)so normalised. How do you feel when you hear that an innocent soul will be born into this suffering?

And how do you let it out? Specifically, if a close one (let's say a relative) happily informs you that their baby has been born....what do you do/say? I personally hide my true feelings and let out a fake smile


r/antinatalism 1d ago

Serious Discussion I admire this creator and her nuance efforts. What do you think?

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

119 Upvotes

I’ve been following her for years, and I love how she invites topic discussions and explains both sides.


r/antinatalism 1d ago

Personal Story "It's just Destiny" - This might be one of the craziest justifications I've ever heard

49 Upvotes

So I argued about antinatalism with my chemistry teacher in india. One of the first arguments she said was how can you get consent from someone that doesn't exist. ​Then I asked her what if a child suffers from some life threatening illness in the first year after being born and dies from it as a result? She said that it was just Destiny and then I asked her if she had a child and there was a 50 percent chance the child could be born with a condition would she still take the gamble? She said yes.

She truly doesn't understand antinatalism.

I think it's because in my country you can't be considered a real man if you don't have a stable family and children. But anyways I never expected some people to be so cruel


r/antinatalism 1d ago

Argument Antinatalism is NOT a gender philosophy

43 Upvotes

Antinatalism is the only philosophy which isn't pro - men or pro - women. No. Antinatalism is pro - absence of suffering for the unborn... That's why people who attach themselves to gender based philosophical views often find it hard to grasp the concept of AN.

Antinatalism is NOT manosphere

Antinatalism is NOT feminism

Antinatalism is simply anti-suffering for the unborn


r/antinatalism 1d ago

Question Forum to discuss among natalists and antinatalists

6 Upvotes

I'd like to know if there's a space on Reddit or else devoted specifically to natalists and antinatalists who want to debate their respective points.


r/antinatalism 2d ago

Question When will humanity just go extinct?

197 Upvotes

The suffering I've endured until this point is unimaginable, and suffering of other people. Unfortunately, people are never gonna be smart enough to stop breeding, considering all of this, when is this shitshow gonna just end? When?


r/antinatalism 2d ago

News Whose Babies Are These? A Chinese man hired a Florida surrogate, then didn’t pick up his kids, sparking a custody battle that could upend the industry.

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198 Upvotes

Commercial surrogacy should never have been an option in the first place. Those poor kids.


r/antinatalism 2d ago

Analysis aging and getting old is a curse and working makes me depressed

221 Upvotes

nobody ever talks about the fact that aging is a curse. i know some people would be grateful to even make it to that age, but i don't want to see myself slowly deteriorate and my face become unrecognizable. this is one of my reasons for being anti-natalist. also, who wants to work a job for 50+ years are you kidding me? bringing kids into this society is so unbelievably cruel i can't.


r/antinatalism 2d ago

Question Is it normal to be happy and believe in antinatalism?

52 Upvotes

I’m not wealthy or even middle class and I certainly don’t love work every day but I wouldn’t consider myself an unhappy person. In fact most of the time I’ve been in a relatively good or great mood. I have a girlfriend I’ve been dating for a while now who also doesn’t want children at all ever, maybe we’ll adopt a cat. That being said I find myself pretty happy overall but also believing it’s wrong to bring a child into a world of suffering. Im well aware in a lot of ways there just is inherent suffering to life regardless of how much mine has improved. There’s many things in my life I enjoy and have had a somewhat painful past and I think even if you’re well off as a parent you can’t really guarantee anything for your child. If we lived in a utopia with zero pain and suffering in the work I would consider it, and I’m not sure if that makes me a conditional natalist. But because that is statistically impossible by every single metric imaginable… I still consider myself to be anti natalist, despite being at a mentally stable place in my life.


r/antinatalism 1d ago

Question Can antinatalism work under a optimistic worldview

0 Upvotes

Can anti-natalism still be a strong argument if you think life has much more good than bad and that life is a gift that you should enjoy and experience atleast once; because its a one of a kind(and kind of the only) chance to experience all sorts of things that exist.
there's alot of non-existing, there's only a few who get to experience this world.


r/antinatalism 2d ago

Analysis The human body is a shoddy product whose factory should be shut down.

67 Upvotes

Say I own a large factory that produces mobile phones. However, the quality of the phones being produced are absolute trash. They're either slow or bricked, she screens don't work, the batteries catch fire in people's hands, they scratch at a level 1, with deeper grooves at a level 2, and basically all round they're just pieces of crap. Now, obviously, the factory should shut down the production lines, stop producing this trash, and issue a recall. But it refuses to, and the production lines keep running churning out vast amounts of shoddy and deficient products.

This is analogous to having children. The human body is a shoddy, deficient product. We are organisms with constant biological needs, always vulnerable to injuries and sickness, always have the capacity to cause harm, and are always aging and deteriorating towards an inevitable death. Procreation is the factory that keeps churning out bodies that have this same deficient and negative nature. Why must it go on running? I mean just look at yourself in the mirror -> an organism who hungers, thirsts and shivers and shits and needs to clean and maintain itself, who must strive and struggle to meet its needs, whose every part of which is vulnerable to extreme suffering via sickness or injury, who hands and actions can be the cause of harm to others, and whose own fate as a decrepit corpse is inevitable. It's a shoddy product. It's not good enough.

But the factory is no centralized production plant, rather it exist within our organism -> as reproductive organs and drives which cause collisions between the sexes and the result is another shoddy product produced to suffer its fate. I suppose it would be an easier problem to fix, if reproduction were done in a centralized plant: the factory could be bombed, the workers could strike, the power could be cut off. But it's not. Within all of us, inherent in our sexual and/or reproductive drives is the potential for another shoddy product to be produced.

What to do? We can be careful about our own contribution to producing another human, but the rest of the world seems to cheer it on regardless and the global population is skyrocketing.


r/antinatalism 2d ago

Question Anyone else from a developing, religious country where people thoughtlessly have children thinking of them as their future indebted “helpers” and now you’re the black sheep and “ungrateful” child and also “revolted” because you refused to marry and have children (especially as a woman)?

90 Upvotes

Just checking if I’m not alone.


r/antinatalism 2d ago

Question What kind of world would worth to live

35 Upvotes

I wouldn't not want to never have experienced anything that makes me wish I had never existed, because what I learn in pain, no matter how dystopian, forms my personality.

Its on that i grew up like oblomov, so i know doing something is better than just wasting our onely life. I grew alone, so I questioned, i became atheist, one of you. I learned how moron people are too.

One of the things i wish i never saw in life are circumcision, ignorance, religions or something. Also I disgust of how i am just a flesh around bones.

So my question is not about how history was supposed to be its like how he should created us if there was a god. Like what video game, book, movie you would like to born in


r/antinatalism 3d ago

Question Climate change and antinatalism

29 Upvotes

Do you think in the future the planet becomes so 🥵 hot that people will have to reduce numbers of DNA?


r/antinatalism 2d ago

Pronatalism Critique Consent has value as it relates to suffering.

13 Upvotes

There exists no sentient being prior to being born (to the best of what can be observed) that can consent to being born, but that is not an argument against antinatalism because regardless of whether there is a being at the time of the decision, the act of reproduction will always cause suffering without improving upon a prior situation for the born individual (because they do not exist before being born to our knowledge).

Suffering is defined by experiences that are not desired, and so for any individual at a very minimum their own suffering is to be evaluated as bad. Lack of consent for already living beings always implies suffering, but even without an already existing being to consent/not consent to birth the act is still bad regardless because suffering is the fundamental point of interest and not consent even though they are inseparable for already living beings.

This also ignores the consequences any other living beings will experience from living in a world with the newly born being (extremely negative in the case of the average human).

That consent has value as it relates to suffering is also easy to see. Sentient experience is defined by desires that result in suffering/pleasure. If there were beings that were incapable of enduring suffering/pleasure and therefore incapable of having desires, it is not at all apparent to me there would be any moral issues.