What I didn’t expect to find in antinatalism was a complex and rich web of ideas, some contradictory and some complementary, but all based on compassion. Most antinatalists I’ve spoken to and whose work I’ve read share the underlying desire to reduce suffering. To minimise harm and hurt. All human life involves suffering, and all humans cause suffering. You may believe that suffering is outweighed by the joys and experiences of life. You may believe that humans are entitled to kill animals to eat or burn the Earth for profit. Those are normal beliefs. But they aren’t universal
Our society has come a long way in making space for things such as maternal ambivalence and the childfree movement, but those are still frameworks that ask whether or not we want to have children, not whether or not we should.
I canned my Guardian subscription because of articles like this one
It’s a plug for her book, it doesn’t actually offer anything at all
It’s an Opinion piece. Every “newspaper” does this.
The fact that some people are downvoting this post, kind of proves the headline.
childfree != antinatalism
i don’t want kids. but i would like the human race to persist, which requires people having kids who actually want them.
I’ve found that most of the people who blindly disagree with the idea of having children are too afraid to confront if they really should have.
What are they doing in the childfree community then? Serious question.
Probably got here filtering “all,” same as I did. Don’t get me wrong, I support c/childfree, just didn’t know it existed, and probably won’t subscribe as that isn’t exactly an issue for me.
While I agree with the premise, I am principally opposed to the rag it’s published in.
The elite will always need more workers for their “economies”.
You’ll show them by not living your dream!!
Unless we figure out how to have perfectly stable populations, a thing humans have never figured out, we need fresh workers so we have a tax base. If a population drops, suddenly you have people continuing to age out of the work force and no one to support them. So yes, depopulation causes economic woes, no way around it. And just because the economy favors the rich, it affects us plebs far more.
Antinatalism may be a sensible theory, but it’s kind of like a government department asking itself if it should disband just because it’s not really necessary anymore.
