In the first days after Donald Trump’s election in November 2024, the purchase of emergency contraceptives spikedwith two companies reporting sales around 1,000% higher than the previous week. Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood reported a 760% increased spiral times the day after the win.
Many Americans are afraid of the incoming administration may further limit reproductive rights2½ years after the US Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion. Today, about a third of the states are prohibit the procedure almost completely or after the first 6 weeks of pregnancy – before many women and girls realize they are pregnant.
Several nominees for Trump’s second administration opposes the right to abortion. But some of his allies have suggested that childlessness itself is a moral failing.
IN a speech in 2019for example, Vice President-elect JD Vance said that people “become more attached to their communities, to their families, to their country because they have children.” Year 2021, he tweeted that low birth rates “have turned many elites into sociopaths.” During a 2024 Trump rally, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders said her children is a “permanent reminder of what’s important” and “keep me humble.” Kamala Harris — who has two stepchildren, but no biological children — “has nothing to keep her humble,” Sanders said.
Politics aside, many people have similar views. People from the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat to Pope Francis have described declining birth rates as a sign of self-centered cultures.
Many childless people want children but cannot have them. Other people may not want children for personal or financial reasons. But advocates of “anti-natalism,” a relatively new social movement, argue giving birth is immoral. The antinatalists I have interviewed push back against the idea that childlessness is selfishness. They believe they are protecting their unborn children, not neglecting them: that childlessness is the ethical choice.
Then and now
In the 1970s, the word “anti-natalism” referred to policies designed to reduce a country’s fertility rate, such as campaign to sterilize millions of men in India during the Emergency 1975-1977. Such policy was designed to address concerns about overpopulation and poverty, spurred in part by growing environmental awareness.
In the following decades, niche environmental movements such as the voluntary human extinction movement was affected by this trend and encouraged people to stop having children for the sake of the planet.
But antinatalism first came to denote a moral philosophy in 2006, when two key books were published: “The art of guillotining Procreators“, by Belgian activist Théophile de Giraud, and “Better never to have been”, by South African philosopher David Benatar.
Instead of emphasizing the harm new humans cause to the planet, this new antinatalism emphasizes the harm life brings to the unborn. By not having children, these philosophers argue, people help the unborn avoid the inherent pain of life. Nor can the unborn experience the pleasures of life – but as Benatar writes“those who never exist cannot be deprived.”
Antinatalism took off among a collection of online communities but reached a wider audience in 2019, when Raphael Samuel, a businessman in Mumbai, tried sue his parents for giving birth to him without his consent. The stunt sparked a public conversation about the ethics of reproduction and prompted the formation of the activist group Child Free India.
Various anti-natalist groups have formed around the world since then, including a subreddit with approximately 230,000 members. Stop having childrenwhich was founded in the United States in March 2021, has host demonstrations which spans Canada, Bangladesh and Poland. In the same year, Asagi Hozumi and Yuichi Furuno created Antinatalism Japan and has held frequent outreach events in Tokyo since 2023. In early 2024, an Israeli activist named Nimrod Harel planned a European tour to promote antinatalism in more than 30 cities.
Investment in the future
Criticism of anti-natalists comes in many different flavors. But most often antinatalists complain about being called selfish: that critics assume they prioritize their own freedom over raising the next generation. “I have never understood people who say ‘not having children is selfish,’” wrote one anti-natalist in his group chat. “Give me a reason why you (have children) for the sake of the child.”
Deciding not to have children may be motivated by a desire for freedom and self-realization, but it doesn’t have to be. Often, among the antinatalist online communities I study, the point of not having children is precisely to protect them.
Shyama, an anti-natalist from Bengaluru, India, used to teach low-income students. After seeing the effects of the covid-19 pandemic on her students, she hopes to turn to a career in child and adolescent mental health research.
She talks about her own children, but only in hypothetical terms, having vowed not to have children. When she reads about bad news, she feels relieved that her child will never have to suffer like that. She refuses birth for their sake. When her friends accused her of challenging other people’s right to have children, she told me that “this was less unfair than bringing another life into this world and forcing upon it a lifetime of inevitable suffering.”
Some critics answer to have children gives parents a stake in the future. Philosopher Samuel Schefflerfor example, argues that having children makes the future personal, anchoring parents to a community that extends beyond their own lifetime.
(Uwe Krejci | DigitalVision via Getty Images) A sense of connection to the past – and the future.
However, antinatalists refuse to equate children with a stake in the future. Anugraha Kumar, a Marxist anti-natalist, told me that most leaders in the Communist Party of India are childless. Without having to support a family, they are free to fight for a better future.
Secularizing birth
Throughout history, catastrophic events have prompted reflection on the ethics of reproduction. After the Holocaust and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Jew and Japanese authors documented some survivors’ fears about childbearing. According to anthropologist Jade Sasserconcerns about climate change, the economy and political turmoil have given rise to current questions about if you are going to have a family.
But I have argued that this story diminishes deeper shifts in how many modern societies understand birth.
Traditionally, birth was often seen as intertwined with religion: something predestined, or even shaped by divine intervention. In many of the societies where anti-natalist groups have formed, however, parents have much more control over whether, when and with whom to give birth – and birth is seen in a more secular way.
Birth is less often seen as part of divine order but is often likened to a lottery: a game of chance where parents roll the dice and their children suffer the consequences. Japanese antinatalists, for example, sometimes compares their birth to “gachapon”: vending machines that randomly spit out a toy every time someone puts money in.
Parents choose to “spin the wheel of life,” a Philadelphia anti-natalist told me, not knowing what kind of life they will create. Without a way to obtain the consent of the unborn, he added, “This is not a risk that is ours to take.”
This article is republished from The conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
