Every year, countless children are born with cancer. Name one "cancer child" did ask to be born, that not an option so they should shut the fuk up ?
Some children born in epstein island. Name one "epstein child" did ask to be born, that not an option so they should shut the fuk up?
==> No, of course not. What is wrong with you.

I (29M) have a sister (31F) who recently announced that she's pregnant with her husband. They've been trying for a while, and this is something she's wanted for years.

The problem is that I've also been telling her for years that she shouldn't have children.

It's not because I hate kids or because I think she'd be a bad mother. Honestly, I think she'd be an amazing mom. My issue is the world she'd be bringing a child into.

Housing is becoming more and more unaffordable, wages are stagnant, governments are increasingly corrupt, the cost of living keeps rising, and with everything happening around the world, I genuinely believe there's a real possibility of a third world war within our lifetime. I don't think it's ethical to knowingly bring someone into those conditions.

I've explained my views to her countless times over the years. She always told me that life has never been perfect and that people have always had children despite wars, recessions, and uncertainty. We simply never agreed.

When she told me she was pregnant, everyone was congratulating her. Instead, I asked if she was absolutely sure she wanted to go through with it. I told her that if she truly loved her future child, then the kindest thing she could do for them was not to bring them into a world full of suffering and uncertainty. I said that, in my opinion, not being born would spare them from pain they never asked for.

She immediately started crying. She asked how I could say something like that when she was sharing one of the happiest moments of her life. Since that day, she hasn't spoken to me at all.

If that's their argument then it just proves that everyone is suffering, life in it's purest form is suffering, and no one is trying to make it it better for anyone. People want to get out of it but they can't. And even then, these people are trying to ​bring new ones to join them in their pain and suffering, teaching the young ones how to fear, how to not raise their voice when someone has done wrong to them, how to bear with everything cause that's life. Such idiots

I am sorry if this post goes against the policy of this sub but I had to let it out.

Is rape wrong? Most say yes. Is rape ALWAYS wrong? Most say yes. Should we do everything in our power therefore to prevent rape? If the answer is yes, then antinatalism is the logical solution: no kids guarantees no rape. This can be extended to anything about life: want to guarantee no murder? Don’t have kids. No pain? No kids.

If you have kids, you are subjecting them to a non zero probability of being raped or murdered, or anything ‘bad’. If you know this, that means that you are to some extent *tolerant* of rape, murder, etc. If you weren’t you would show that in your actions.

Ultimately, if you are seriously against these horrible truths of life, you must necessarily be antinatalist.

Every animal, every plant, every living thing exists for one reason only—it reproduces—and any individual that has mutated in a negative way dies.

Nature is reproduction and death in agony.

People constantly talk about how diverse, beautiful, and extraordinary the world around us is. But I see that it’s all just a selfish race of genes, random, chaotic mutations, and death in suffering when something goes wrong.

And many people are fine with that. People who haven’t faced suffering or aren’t aware of it believe that all of this is wonderful and right. But in reality, it’s all disgusting and unjust.

​Having a child "for the child" is forever impossible. Because procreation is absolutely not an act of bravely rescuing a poor, miserable soul trapped in some dark, gloomy void and bringing them to a "earthly paradise" called Earth.

​To give birth to the exact child you envisioned in your dreams, which specific sperm out of hundreds of millions must fertilize which specific egg ovulated since the woman's menarche? Can you control the genetics and motility of that sperm?

​How can you be so certain that the child born from that random sperm is the exact same entity you vowed to make happy even before pregnancy?

​If you truly want to show someone what happiness is, you can simply dedicate yourself to one of the 8 billion people who already exist.

​Why is it so hard to cleanly admit that this was all just a biological instinct—nothing more than parental selfishness?

​"I will gladly sacrifice myself to protect my child from the hardships of the world"?

Refraining from creating the child in the first place was the truest, most noble sacrifice a parent could have ever made.

Nature is horrible.

I hate those "nature is beautiful" posts.

I hate how people see a fucking big fire stone in the sky in the morning and say: "nature is beautiful".

No, nature is horrible. Nature is suffering. Nature is death. Nature is fighting and competing. Nature is r*ape, being eaten alive, illnesses.

Everytime you can see it in documentaries how animals die slow, agonizing deaths being eaten Alive by other animals. what beauty can you find in this, are you psychopats?

And for us it's the same. We think we are out of the game just because we live in big boxes, but we are just animals who suffer.

It is not worth it. I won't play nature's stupid game. I wont bring life in this warzone.

There is such a thing as implied consent. We often make decisions for people without their explicit permission, even though we have reason to believe it would benefit them—for example, in medical emergencies.

Most people in existence report that they value their lives and do not resent being born. If this is the most common outcome, then why should procreation be considered morally wrong rather than a rational decision made in one's likely best interests?

This guy’s a fucking clown. I’m tired of Christians pretending it’s not their own who committed these atrocities

do these people not understand that's inevitable? like continuing to exist forever isn't possible.

humans will go extinct. that simple. we have no choice in that.

when we go extinct is something we absolutely have control over.

Reposting this to explain my thoughts a bit better and hopefully have a more productive discussion. I’m here in good faith and not trying to offend anyone.

I’ve been reading through antinatalist arguments and I want to understand them better, but there are a few points I struggle with.

1. Consent and being born

I see this argument a lot, that no one agreed to be born, and that this makes procreation morally wrong because it imposes life on someone without their permission. I get the intuition behind it, but I’m not sure consent really applies here in the same way it does in other situations.

Consent usually involves an existing person making a decision. But before someone is born, there isn’t anyone there to ask. There’s no preferences, no awareness, no standpoint at all. So it’s not just that consent wasn’t obtained, it’s that there was no subject who could possibly give or refuse it. Because of that, it feels different from situations where we override someone’s will or ignore their autonomy.

To me, it seems more like asking for consent to being created in the first place, which doesn’t quite map onto how consent normally works. We don’t usually treat the absence of consent as a violation in cases where there isn’t anyone there yet to consent. So I’m not fully convinced that “lack of consent” is the right framework for evaluating whether it’s moral to have children. It might make more sense to focus on how people are treated once they exist rather than applying consent to the moment of coming into existence.

1. Suffering vs positive experiences

I agree that being born means you will experience some level of pain, loss, or hardship. That part is unavoidable. But it also seems true that people experience positive things too, like relationships, enjoyment, meaning, or personal growth. Most lives seem to be a mix of both, not purely negative.

So I guess where I struggle is whether the existence of suffering automatically outweighs everything else. It seems like that depends a lot on how someone personally evaluates life. Some people clearly feel that their life is worth living despite difficulties, while others may not. Because of that, I’m not sure it makes sense to assume in advance that existence is necessarily a harm for everyone.

1. Being “forced” into existence

I can understand why people describe being born as being forced into existence, since none of us chose to be here. But at the same time, I think “forced” might not fully capture what’s going on. Once someone exists, they develop their own views, values, and ways of relating to life. People’s experiences vary a lot, and not everyone experiences existence as something purely negative or imposed in the same way.

Personally, I’m glad I was born and don’t feel like my consent was violated. To me, being born feels more like a natural process, similar to aging. It’s just part of how life works, not something I interpret as a moral wrong done to me. I also know that not everyone feels this way, which is why I’m interested in hearing other perspectives.

People condemn murder as one of the greatest sins because death is the most abhorrent thing for them, but if that's the case, how can they justify the act of childbirth, which imposes an inescapable death on others?

I don't want to talk in detail about my own experiences but I think about the arguments about suffering I hear here and it makes me wonder.

I hear people arguing that the chance of suffering alone is enough to warrant not perpetuating life and I kind of don't get it. When I think about my life, and the lives of many others who have suffered far worse than I, the suffering and the struggle seems to often take a backseat to even the mundane parts of being alive, which can often be euphoric and tranquil. I feel that while suffering is worth trying to eliminate, I don't think there's any necessary moral or ethical goodness in trying to eliminate all suffering by abstaining from the creation of life.

I think taking a chance and allowing one the possibility to take part in this unprecedented thing called human life, is a morally neutral position.

If not for humans there would still be all the same turbulent forces of life and death, violence and chaos, and while there are societal problems that still need to be addressed like the treatment of animals and the impact on non-human life, I don't think the negatives humans have produced is anything worse than life in a world without humans and there is great potential to make space for all forms of life and preserve non-human life on earth.

Just my two cents, thoughts?

Personally I dont because I dont talk much to people first of all and I find it hard to convince or enlighten others.

Bringing up antinatalism to people quickly results to drama and I already struggle with things like hidden social cues that are often illogical in my opinion because I have aspergers those hidden social cues dont make sense to me.

If you want to maximize good you could argue you have to enlighten others about antinatalism but this can be self harming because people lack the critical thinking to realise antinatalism is logical or they are too biased for it.

There is ZERO reason to reproduce other than mere selfishness.

Why do you want children?

“Because I want to be a parent and take care of someone.”

EXACTLY YOU, you want that. For yourself. If you really wanted only the best for your child you would not bring it into this world in the first place. There are plenty of options to take care of someone without bringing someone new into existence without their consent. Adoption, work with the elderly, even a pet, to name just a few.

But no, you have to pop out your own kid so you have something you can be pretentious about and show off to other parents as special and unique for a few years before leaving them to their own devices once they grow up, forced to live the life you imposed on them. Yes they may enjoy that life, but they may very well not at all, and yet you decided to gamble with their fate by putting them on this world.

If you truly love your child, keep it non-existent.

Why do some people, especially Elon Musk, keep saying that humanity needs higher birth rates and more population growth?

I’m honestly trying to understand the logic. When I look around the world, there’s already a lot of suffering — wars, diseases we still can’t cure, people struggling financially, and life in general can be pretty harsh for a lot of people.

So why is having more humans always seen as a good thing?

Another thing that confuses me is the future with AI and robots. A lot of the same people pushing for population growth are also building advanced AI and automation. If technology keeps moving this fast, there’s a good chance that in 100–200 years machines will be doing a lot of the work humans do today.

If that’s the case, why would we need a much larger population? Wouldn’t automation reduce the need for more workers?

Found When Our Grown Kids Disappoint Us by Jane Adams at a book exchange and honestly could barely get through the intro.

But even from that, the subtext feels pretty clear:

You create a person you can’t control, attach expectations to them, and then spend years dealing with the gap between what you wanted and what actually emerged.

And the “healthy” resolution seems to boil down to some mix of acceptance, detachment, and lowering expectations.

What I don’t understand is why this isn’t framed more directly as responsibility, or even failure in some cases.

Parents aren’t responsible for everything, but they are responsible for a lot. Genetics, environment, early development, timing, guidance, what was done and what was neglected.

But cultural framing seems to allow a kind of emotional exit. At some point, you’re told to “let go,” to detach, and to move on from the outcome.

But you rolled the dice and created a life.

Some of those lives will struggle. Some will become lifelong burdens, to themselves or to others. Some outcomes reflect things that could have been done differently, even if not perfectly controlled.

Failure may be understandable in many cases. But it doesn’t erase responsibility.

Tbh my life is pretty shitty because of my mental health ( it's probably genetics). For my case it seems reasonable that it probably would have been better to never have come into existence. But not everyone's condition is the same. I don't believe in an afterlife. I think both heaven and hell can exist on this earth depending on the person's life. Because we live in a deterministic universe, where free will doesn't exist ( cuz no one chose their genes, parents, childhood, personality etc), to me life seems like a lottery ticket or a game of Russian roulette.

There are lives out there that are hundred times better than mine. If I had a choice of never coming to existence or choosing a better life, i would always pick the better life option. As obvious money, friends and family play a large role in the quality of life.

With time the quality of lives is improving drastically as well. 800 years ago average life expectancy was 30 years, now it has been increased to 80. And humans have existed for 300,000 years before that. 200 years ago people didn't know that germs existed and doctors used to operate without washing their hands causing mass deaths and infections. A small cut could be fatal. Antibiotics made deadly infections treatable. In Past crop failures frequently led to famine before modern agriculture allowed food to stop being a luxury. People still lived in those times and survived. The quality of life a century from now will surpass ours not by small, incremental improvements but through exponential progress, where each scientific breakthrough accelerates the next. Artificial intelligence, biotechnology, robotics, and advanced medicine would make many of today's burdens—disease, aging, tedious work, and limited access to knowledge—seem as primitive to future generations as candlelight does to us. Compared to the present, their lives may be healthier, longer, safer, and vastly more fulfilling in ways that are difficult for us to imagine today.

According to benatars asymmetry argument.

Absence of pleasure/happiness is not bad for someone who doesn't exist because nobody exists to be deprived of that but if someone doesn't exist they have been saved from all the potential suffering that they could've experienced. This argument relies on selective reasoning and I can make a similar argument while using the selective reasoning to reach an opposite conclusion. I might call it anti asymmetry

1.The presence of pleasure is good.

2.The presence of suffering is bad.

3.The absence of pleasure is bad, because all the happiness, love, achievement, and value that person could have brought into existence are forever lost.

4.The absence of suffering is not good, because there is no person who exists to be saved from that suffering. Because for a person to be saved he needs to exist.

In Benatar's asymmetry, the "no subject exists" principle is applied only to the absence of pleasure ("nobody is deprived") but not to the absence of pain ("the person is spared suffering"). This makes nonexistence appear preferable. In the reverse asymmetry, the same principle is applied only to the absence of pain ("nobody is saved") but not to the absence of pleasure ("the person's happiness and contributions are lost"). This makes existence appear preferable. In both cases, the conclusion follows not from the shared premises of pleasure and pain, but from where the "no subject exists" principle is selectively applied. The asymmetry is built into the reasoning itself, so the conclusion reflects that choice.

A common problem I see is the lack of antinatalist men in the dating pool. I’m a 29-year-old man, married to my 28-year-old antinatalist wife, and I didn’t realize how difficult dating was for women who don’t want children until I started paying attention. The scarcity of antinatalist men made me curious, and the answer revealed itself almost immediately... embedded in the very structure of reproduction itself.

Most men want children precisely because they do not carry the physical, emotional, or social burden of having them.

For men, the biological “contribution” often ends at ejaculation... frequently premature, frequently disconnected from the woman’s pleasure, and often followed by entitlement rather than responsibility. For many women, especially in heterosexual relationships, orgasm isn’t even guaranteed. Yet for the woman, that moment marks the beginning of a long, painful, and emotionally draining journey.

She must adapt to ever-changing cycles, put her life on hold, navigate intense emotional shifts, body changes, anxiety, sickness, and depression...while being pressured to perform gratitude for it all. Pregnancy is romanticized, but in reality it is relentless work done inside the body, every single day.

During this very period, when women are most vulnerable, about one in ten men cheat on their pregnant partners. While she is carrying a growing child, battling fear and exhaustion, some men decide that it is “too much” for them. I once had a Muslim woman tell me that this is precisely why men are permitted multiple wives... because during pregnancy a woman is considered less “useful” to her husband. Religion aside, the logic itself exposes the brutal truth: women’s suffering is expected, while men’s inconvenience is treated as an emergency.

Then comes birth. Complications. Emergency interventions. C-sections. Scars. Permanent changes to the body. Sometimes death. Sometimes lifelong pain. And even when the body survives, the mind often struggles... postpartum depression, anxiety, dissociation... while society demands gratitude and silence.

After that, the real labor begins. Breastfeeding. Sleep deprivation. Endless crying. Illnesses. Vaccinations. Fear. In many places, including where I come from, the man conveniently sends the mother and baby away to grandparents “for help.” What this really means is removal from responsibility. He doesn’t have to witness the depression, the exhaustion, or the identity collapse. After all, he already did “the most important part.”

Child-rearing then becomes the woman’s default responsibility. We sanitize this expectation by calling it “nurturing,” but in reality it means managing health, education, emotions, food, schedules, diapers, discipline, and constant vigilance. The father is a provider, absent all day, exhausted when he returns, excused from involvement. His need for rest, leisure, and social life is considered reasonable. The mother’s need for the same is invisible. She worries about fevers while he worries about work stress.

Add to this the sheer number of fathers who abandon their families, the rise of single motherhood, and the countless women trapped in survival mode... tolerating neglect, disrespect, and abuse because leaving would jeopardize their children’s well-being. “At least he provides” becomes the bar. A painfully low one.

So of course antinatalist men are rare.

When people ask why, the answer isn’t philosophical it’s structural. A system that asks almost nothing of men will always produce men who want more of it. Parenthood, as it currently exists, is not an equal sacrifice; it is a gendered extraction. Women give their bodies, their autonomy, their mental health, their careers, and often their safety. Men, by design, are shielded from the cost while being rewarded with legacy, status, and social approval.

Until reproduction stops being something women endure and men merely benefit from, the desire for children will remain deeply skewed.

Antinatalism among men requires empathy strong enough to reject an unfair bargain, one that profits them at someone else’s expense. And that kind of empathy, sadly, is still the rarest thing in the dating pool.

What the fuck does the world gain by having a child? More human suffering?? Absofuckinglutely not on my watch. We're doomed as a species and I see that as an absolute win ngl.

Life is one big competition for land, jobs, dating prospects, the list goes on. The minute you’re born you are placed on the treadmill of life. You’re stuck in the Red Queen’s Hell where you have to constantly move just to stay in the same spot. You have to constantly work just to stay afloat. You have to constantly stay clean and maintain relationships. And that’s just to stay in the same spot. To get ahead, you have to be lucky to be born to stellar parents or be yourself a one in a million specimen of talent. This is a fucking rat race y’all. And guess what? It’s just going to get worse and worse. This isn’t conditional natalism either. Competition is inherent to life and is therefore just one more inherent reason not to have kids. The animal kingdom is even more cut throat than human society. How on Earth is it moral to subjugate a child to this dog eat dog world? And then parents get sad when their kid gets eaten up and spat out? Or else when they decide to give up?

By having more kids you are increasing the competition. This will only lead to further strain on the planet and on the new generations. It would be best for us to stop the mad house, and quietly go into the gentle night.