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.
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.