Antinatalism, the ancient and unsettling idea that being born is a harm
Antinatalism is the philosophical judgment that having children is wrong or cannot be justified. The label is new, probably first used in a 2006 French manifesto, but the thought is very old: Sophocles, writing near the end of his life in 406 BC, had a chorus declare that never being born is best.
Modern antinatalists offer several reasons. Bringing someone into existence exposes them to the risk of serious harm, and guarantees some suffering, death included, without any chance for them to agree. Every new person also affects other people, animals and the environment. The best-known argument comes from the South African philosopher David Benatar, who claims an asymmetry between good and bad experiences means coming into being is always a harm. Some thinkers extend the case beyond humans to all sentient creatures.
The idea surfaces across history. The Arab poet-philosopher al-Ma'arri had his tomb inscribed with a line blaming his father for the wrong of begetting him, a wrong he himself never passed on. Flaubert wrote in 1846 that he would curse himself if he became a father. Schopenhauer asked in 1851 whether humanity would go on if procreation were purely a matter of cool reasoning rather than need and pleasure.
Religious traditions have flirted with it too. Readers of the Buddha have argued that parents, by begetting children, set old age and death in motion, though the Japanese philosopher Masahiro Morioka notes that early Buddhism also valued human birth as a chance to reach nirvana. The Marcionites saw the world as the flawed work of a cruel creator and urged people not to add to it; the Encratites refused to supply fresh fodder for death; Cathars and Manichaeans thought birth trapped souls in evil matter. One modern writer, Robbert Zandbergen, even likens antinatalism to Taoism, using the image of ice that would have been better never frozen.
Philosophers distinguish all this from state population policies aimed at fewer births, which carry no claim that existence itself is harmful. They also separate it from simple childfreeness and the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.
Source: Antinatalism
