There are more than eight billion people in our world. It would seem, based on the overwhelming evidence, that any notion that life is hateful and that no more human beings ought to be born has been thoroughly rejected. Births are obviously not a rare event. Human beings, on average, don’t find being alive so burdensome that they wouldn’t wish the same on anyone else, including those yet to be born.

And yet, despite the sheer number of people on the planet, philosophies against birth, against life, against the sheer fact of human existence, have long been a planetary phenomenon. The raw material for this way of thinking comes directly from life itself. Each of us has probably reflected at some point that to be born is to be condemned to suffer, because suffering (including the pain of giving birth to children) is the lot of humankind. From papercuts to pancreatic cancer, from headaches to toothaches, and from the sadness of loss to the pain of separation, to be a person is to realize, day in and day out, that perfection and bliss are not features of human existence. Add a little navel-gazing to humanity’s perennial griping about the burdens that the living must bear, and, voilà, you have anti-procreationist philosophies almost à la carte. Pretty much anyone with a backache and some free time will eventually hit on the idea that the pageant of human suffering could be avoided if only people would stop reproducing.

And so things have continued age to age, each new generation of humans breaking anew on the rocks of life and rediscovering the philosophy of woe. In Sophocles’ (ca. 497/496406/405 BC) tragedy Oedipus at Colonus, the play’s eponymous antihero cries out that he was “born to misery, as born I was.” The Chorus does not give Oedipus false hope on this score: “Not to be born is, beyond all estimation, best; but when a man has seen the light of day, this is next best by far, that with utmost speed he should go back from where he came,” they proclaim. This was all already probably a cliché in Sophocles’ day. Search where you will in history, you will almost always find someone who has thought himself into a sour corner concerning the misfortune of his having been born. For instance, in the tenth and eleventh centuries a poet named Ma’arrat al-Nu’mān, better known as al-Ma’arrī (973-1057) was complaining about his lot (he was blinded by smallpox at a young age and did not get along well with his literary patrons). He is often compared to the Biblical figure of Job, who may be the gold standard worldwide when it comes to wishing, at least in fits of frustration, that one had never been born. But although many in every culture and century have said that human life is hard and that being born is a tragedy a swift death can undo, there is something new in the philosophy of antiexistence. The twentyfirst century has witnessed the rise of what is better called “antinatalism.” Antinatalism is perhaps best defined by philosopher Thaddeus Metz, who describes it as “the view that procreation is invariably wrong to some degree and is often all things considered impermissible.” Writing in 2012, Metz continues: “The variant of antinatalism that has interested philosophers in the past 15 years or so includes a claim about why [procreation] is morally problematic, namely, that potential procreators owe a duty to the individual who would have been created not to create her, as opposed to already existent people who would be wronged by her creation.” This goes far beyond Oedipus’ whining. What many antinatalists are saying is that it is not just inconvenient to be born or better to put oneself out of one’s misery, but that it is morally wrong to give life to another person—that human existence, period, is morally indefensible. In 2006, a South African philosopher named David Benatar published a systematic, wellargued presentation of the antinatalist position in Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence. Benatar’s main argument, summed up in the title, rests on what he calls the “asymmetry” between pleasure and pain. Simply put, the person who has never existed will have missed out on whatever pleasures and pains he or she would have experienced in his or her life. This is not an evensteven equation, Benatar wants us to understand. Being born and thus experiencing pain (as all sentient creatures do) outweighs any ameliorating effect of also experiencing pleasure. Not being born, and forgoing pain, outweighs forgoing whatever pleasures one might also have known, had one existed. In other words, pleasure and pain do not hang equally in the balance when one considers whether someone should or should not exist. Pain always outweighs pleasure, and therefore the balance is in favor of not existing. This is the “asymmetry” part of Benatar’s thinking. “There is a crucial difference,” Benatar writes, “between harms (such as pains) and benefits (such as pleasures) which entails that existence has no advantage over, but does have disadvantages relative to, nonexistence.”

Japanese philosopher Masahiro Morioka distinguishes antinatalism from antiprocreationism, which he sees as being more strictly against human beings’ giving birth to children. This view, as Morioka reports, is most succinctly transmitted in a 2006 book by a Belgian author named Théophile de Giraud, L’Art de guillotiner les procréateurs: Manifeste antinataliste. In making this distinction, Giraud lays out in detail a line of argument that other contemporary students of antilife philosophies have also argued, maintaining that much of early Christian writing can be read as advocating against the bringing of children into the world. According to him, antiprocreationism is not just a foreign or pagan obsession, but something that infiltrated Christendom, at least in the early years of the Church. Giraud enlists in his argument the nineteenthcentury thinker Søren Kierkegaard (18131855), whom he describes as “convinced that Christianity is radically incompatible with procreation.” In a translation from volume five of Kierkegaard’s journals from 18541855, Giraud quotes Kierkegaard as declaring that “It was obvious in the eyes of Christ that the Christian should not get married.”

In addition to Job’s example cited earlier, Giraud conscripts seeming allies from both the Old and New Testaments, including Jeremiah, Ecclesiastes, and Christ himself pausing on the way to his crucifixion to advise the weeping women, “The days are coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren and the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed!’” (see Luke 3:2831). Giraud goes on to reference such proponents of virginity and celibacy as the Church Fathers St. Jerome (ca. 342/347420), St. John Chrysostom (347408), and St. Augustine (354450), agreeing with St. Augustine’s wish that everyone would “abstain from all intercourse” so that “the city of God would be filled much more speedily, and the end of the world would be hastened.”

Is it true that Western civilization and even Christianity are riddled with antilife thinking? At first glance it would certainly seem so. If we jump centuries ahead from St. Augustine’s time, we find German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (17881860), who was profoundly influenced by a Buddhist anthropology of suffering and release. Like Kierkegaard and Giraud, Schopenhauer sees the early Christians as facing squarely the brutal facts of human existence. Researcher Christopher Janaway writes that Schopenhauer analyses Clement of Alexandria’s [(ca. 150ca. 215)] discussion of sexual abstinence and rebuts his criticism of earlier views that are considered heretical—Gnostics, Marcionites, and others. Clement ‘accuses the Marcionites of finding fault with Creation . . . since Marcion teaches that nature is bad and made from bad materials . . . ; and so we should not populate the world but instead refrain from marrying.’ Clement’s grounds are that this shows ‘gross ingratitude, enmity, and rage against the one who made the world’ [. . .]. But, for Schopenhauer, . . . it is these earlier ascetic positions that are genuinely Christian. Likewise in modern times, Protestantism is aberrant, for Schopenhauer, because in eliminating asceticism it has ‘already abandoned the innermost kernel of Christianity’ and turned into a ‘comfortable’ and ‘shallow’ rationalism, which, he boldly states, ‘is not Christianity’ [. . .].

Even in what he sees as the twilight of Christendom, Schopenhauer embraced a kind of Christianthemed antiprocreationism, or maybe even a protoantinatalism, although these, being rooted in the Bible and the early Church, were necessarily not nihilistic rejections of human life as having no meaning. Things changed after Schopenhauer, who influenced a late nineteenth and early twentiethcentury German writing anonymously under the pen names Kurnig and Quartus. “Mankind will never achieve the blissful life once dreamed of by the Greeks,” Kurnig wrote in 1903.

Rather, the most important thing will remain to be: getting through with as little pain and suffering as possible. Thus we are to procreate as little as possible in order to keep as small as possible, and to continually diminish, the number of sufferers. [. . .] Mankind [must be prepared] for an exodus from existence, as imagined by the saints in the religious sphere.

In the same publication Kurnig writes, “With increasing intelligence, mankind comes to realise that, all in all, suffering far outweighs pleasure, that it must stop procreation and must do so as soon as possible. Thus: NEONIHILISM.”

This “neonihilism” comes through in big, booming chords in much of nineteenth century literature and philosophy, sometimes with defiant dithyrambs to lifeforce in the face of what some thinkers saw as the emptiness of human existence. Friedrich Nietzsche (18441900) took, in many ways, an opposite view to Schopenhauer, seeing life not as a burden but as an almost riotous bounty, although set within a meaningless and disenchanted universe in which values would have to be created by human willpower in the place of defunct revealed religion and its Author.

The various strains of nihilism espoused by Schopenhauer, Kurnig/Quartus, and Nietzsche seem almost uplifting compared with what was to follow in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries. For example, Argentinian philosopher Julio Cabrera published work in 1989 on “negative ethics,” an “ethics of borderlines,” as Cabrera puts it, which operates from such premises as that “the positive value of human life is neither obvious nor evident and should be proved by arguments” (which Cabrera finds unconvincing) and that humans should never procreate, as doing so puts others “in the structural discomfort of terminality via unavoidable manipulation.” What Cabrera means by the latter phrase is that everything and everyone in the universe is bound for destruction (“terminal”) and this, being unavoidable, is “structural,” so that bringing new life into such a predicament—“manipulat[ing]” babies into existing—is to produce unwarranted and indefensible “discomfort,” an unethical thing to do. Cabrera’s structural, metaethical critique of the very fact of human existence is several steps beyond the gloomy antiprocreationism of the nineteenth-century Germans and Dane. What we find in Cabrera’s negative ethics is a prelude to Benatar’s Better Never to Have Been.

Benatar, unlike earlier antiprocreationists, has very little to say about Christianity, or about religion in general. However, it is important to return to the religious angle of antiprocreationism, and to fill in the gap in Christendom between the radical early years of Jesus of Nazareth’s movement, including the way in which His followers prepared for His Second Coming (up to several centuries following His Resurrection), and the “death of God” fallout which Nietzsche and many other modern thinkers noticed and often welcomed. When we jump ahead from the early Church to Arthur Schopenhauer, what are we missing in the story of antiprocreationism?

The rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire paralleled the multifaceted unraveling of Roman rule. Early Christians who called for keeping new human beings out of our vale of tears were informed not just by the promises of salvation which Christianity offered, but also by the social chaos all around them. As Christianity took hold and took root, though, this chaos largely abated. A new vision of society emerged. The long centuries of settled Christendom were marked, especially during the Middle Ages, by the social kingship of Christ, to use a much later phrasing. Heaven had not been dragged down to earth, but there was, for many, an understanding of the universe as being inside a Catholic Mass. The proper disposition of the world and of man within it was one of peace. Within this peace flowered community, belonging, the joining together of many men and women into one—one cosmic whole regularly referred to as the Body of Christ. The Gospel message that most of us have heard in Mass is not the antinatalist one, not the one in which Jesus is portrayed as having railed against the horrors of being born. Rather, the Gospel message most Christians know is one of sacrifice and radical love. Jesus’ death on the Cross was both of these. His Passion was the example for all to follow forever.

Imagine, to put it another way, if Jesus had never existed. “Oh, happy fault,” Christians have sung, celebrating the fall of Adam that precipitated—disaster calling forth grace—the birth, death, and resurrection of the Redeemer. This metaphysical linking of one man’s life and death to, in time, untold billions of others was the heart of Christendom. It also echoed in a communitarianism that typified the Christian countries. “Better never to have been” makes no sense at all when everyone is part of a family, a village, a cosmic order. As the turmoil of falling Rome gave way to the relative peace of Christian Europe, men and women became knit together in social and spiritual ways that placed strong limits on whatever antiprocreationist theorizing some down-in-the-mouth philosopher might have espoused. One could not be against humans, because each human life, by Christian definition, had meaning sub specie aeternitatis. In a Christian world, one’s life is not one’s possession to dispose of as one pleases. Likewise, other lives are not one’s playthings, to be called forth or culled according to local circumstances. Each life was necessarily tied to everyone else’s, including those who had gone before us. In the economy of grace, all lives matter, interconnectedly and infinitely so, for all eternity.

By contrast, and emerging long after the end of Christendom, Benatar’s premise—and that of most modern antinatalist and antiprocreationist writing—is individualism, the idea that the existence or nonexistence of any one person has no substantial bearing on the lives of others. If all we are is individuals, and if the standard applied is pleasure and pain—and if, as Benatar puts it, pleasure and pain are asymmetrical, pain being a far worse “bad” than pleasure is a good “good”—then it follows that nonexistence is the only good option. Benatar states flatly that “nobody is disadvantaged by not coming into existence,” by which he means that if someone does not exist, then he or she is not there to suffer the consequences of not existing. But this perspective is (unwarrantedly I think) limited to the individual who does or does not, theoretically, come into being. However, each life, whether welcomed or not, changes every other life to some degree. There are no individuals in the sense of fully independent human beings whose lives neither affect anyone else’s nor are affected by those of others. We are bound to one another, beholden to one another. The absent leave holes in our world. A baby deemed better never to have been does not simply not exist. He or she is an ache in his or her mother’s heart, a pang of grief and remorse in his or her father’s soul. Benatar dedicates his book to his parents and his brothers. This is not ironic or contradictory. It is just the rest of the story, the complement to the thought that flits through everyone’s head sometimes that it would better if we had never seen the light of day. However, as Benatar readily acknowledges, if everyone were to follow this logic, then the human race would inevitably choose not to have been, or, as one scholarly critic of Benatar’s put it, to “return whence we came.” But we know better. We know that not having been is not better for anyone. Suicide notes are testimonials to the fallacy of individualism.

In a section on the consequences of steadily reducing the human population, Benatar takes into account the costs to existing people if not enough new people are born. If Adam and Eve were the only people ever to exist, Benatar postulates, and if Adam had died, widowing Eve, then Eve, the only human alive, would experience a “reduced [. . .] quality of life” because the population had “fallen beneath some threshold—in this case the threshold necessary for company. Had [Eve] had children she would at least have had some human company after Adam’s death.” In this way, Benatar does differentiate between an individual qua individual and an individual “sub specie humanitatis.” “A life devoted to the service of humanity [. . .] can be meaningful, sub specie humanitatis, even if, from the perspective of the universe, it is not,” Benatar writes. “Other lives, though, such as that of the man who devotes his life to counting the number of blades of grass on different lawns, would lack meaning sub specie humanitatis.” But Benatar concludes that both kinds of lives are “meaningless [. . .] from the perspective of the universe.”

Human lives may or may not be “meaningless [. . .] from the perspective of the universe.” But the universe is not at issue here. Human lives are. And human lives most certainly are not “meaningless” to other humans. Recently I have been following the story of a young woman named Grace Schara, who died in a hospital bed in Appleton, Wisconsin, in October 2021. Grace’s parents later sued the hospital, arguing that Grace, who had Down syndrome, deserved to live but was not given the medical care necessary to allow her to continue doing so. Grace’s life was not an isolated event the ending of which affected no one. Would it have been better if Grace Schara had never existed? The answer is emphatically, “No.”

One article about the trial following Grace’s passing included a photo of a banner with Grace’s picture on it, held aloft by her bereaved father, Scott, and emblazoned in part with the words, “His light shined through her. Light overcomes darkness. John 1:5.” Scott explains that out of the tragedy of his daughter’s passing some good is coming into the world, since God has called him and others to share uncomfortable truths about how hospitals in the United States treat patients with disabilities. “Grace’s death has not been in vain,” Scott says. “She has woken up tens of thousands of people through her death. It is awesome to be part of this process.” If Grace had never been, her father would probably have lived a very different life. Whether that life would have had more or less pleasure, more or less pain, is almost certainly irrelevant to Scott Schara. What he wants, what Grace’s family want, is to have Grace back in their lives. Grace touched thousands, possibly millions, both because of her living and because of her suffering and dying. The computation, for every human life, is not in what is lost or gained, but in who is lost or gained. The human person is always in community, and the meaning of a life is never reducible to a Kantian individualism.

Grace would have been aborted by many couples in the United States today for whom “better never to have been” means “You are a burden to me, and to yourself, and to everyone.” However, that is a noxious lie. And it is one best countered by an embrace of all human persons, without distinction.

The antidote to antinatalism and antiprocreationism is the same as that to contraception mentalities, namely, love, especially as articulated by the late Pope John Paul II (19202005) in his meditations on what it means to be a human being. “The longing for true happiness for another person, a sincere devotion to that person’s good, puts the priceless imprint of altruism on love,” the pontiff wrote. “But none of this will happen,” he warned, “if the love between a man and a woman is dominated by an ambition to possess. [. . . ] Love develops on the basis of the totally committed and fully responsible attitude of a person to a person.” Pope John Paul II is speaking here of the differences between love and eroticism, between sensual pleasure and devotion to another human being, but his words apply equally to antinatalism. “The world of existences is the world of objects,” the late pope writes,

amongst them we distinguish between persons and things. A person differs from a thing in structure and in degree of perfection. To the structure of the person belongs an ‘interior,’ in which we find the elements of spiritual life, and it is this that compels us to acknowledge the spiritual nature of the human soul, and the peculiar perfectibility of the human person. This determines the value of the person. A person must not be put on the same level as a thing.

Benatar, and Thaddeus Metz, situate some arguments for antinatalism in humans’ lack of “cosmic meaning.” But the cosmos, the physical universe, is not where our meaning lies. If that tree, or that rock, or that planet’s moon had never existed, well, nobody would have noticed, and nobody would have cared. Both sub specie aeternitatis and sub specie humanitatis, whether this or that thing did or did not exist is essentially meaningless. People, however, are different. People don’t just exist or not exist. Our relations with others are rooted in, premised upon, the unrepeatable interiority and futurity of others. The nonbeing of others is not a zero-sum equation. People who should be there but who, for whatever reason, were deemed better never to have been born are not ciphers but black holes, gravity fields into which fall the might-have-beens of countless other lives in perpetuity. The logic of “prochoice” is that it makes no difference which choice we make, but every moment of our human experience screams out the contrary—that the other is our everything, that I must have you so that we can exist together.

If only more of us had listened to the teachings of Pope John Paul II. Antinatalism has become not just a minor subfield of philosophy and theology but a common topic in scholarly and popular writing today. If anything, antinatalism is the tenor of our age. The prejudice against the mere existence of other people is, ironically, the shared ground of our lives together. The year 2020 was declared the year of the “COVID baby bust.” But this dearth of babies was not attributable solely to the novel coronavirus. As researcher Jenna Healey reminds us, “childfree activists Ellen Peck and Shirley Radl founded the National Organization for Non-Parents (NON), the first organization dedicated to defending the rights of the ‘childless by choice,’” more than fifty years ago, in 1972.

Long before that (see for example the writings of novelist Thomas Hardy (18401928), the specter of preferable nonexistence often peeked into Western civilization. In an essay, Thaddeus Metz, a frequent philosophical sparring partner of David Benatar, references Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb. Contemporary discourse is also awash in transhumanist thinking, with many viewing technology as a way to escape the human race’s fate of suffering. “My destiny / Is clear to me / Alternative / Reality,” writes a techno-antinatalist going by the pen name of “No One’s Job.” Antinatalism is increasingly a topic of research and concern elsewhere, too, such as in Russia. The People’s Republic of China recently concluded a decades-long nightmarish experiment in draconian restrictions on human fertility. Back in America, and attempting, apparently, to outdo the PRC’s One Child Policy with a No Child Policy of its own, Planned Parenthood is antinatalism mechanized, systematized, and perpetuated by endless taxpayer dollars. Academic journals are also home to much antinatalist writing, such as Paddy McQueen’s 2019 essay “A Defence of Voluntary Sterilisation,” in which McQueen recommends “challeng[ing] pronatalist discourses that portray a childfree life as necessarily less fulfilling than parenthood.”

There is even a literary genre that might best be categorized as antinatalist. Take, for instance, Tractatus Logico-Suicidalis, a heartbreaking book written by Swiss writer Hermann Burger (19421989). The English translation bears the subtitle “On Killing Oneself,” and that is precisely the book’s theme. Tractatus Logico-Suicidalis is the aphoristic diary of a man who argues against his own existence, often sarcastically and sardonically. “I and I alone am master of this highest of all sufferings: death, killing, and being killed,” Burger writes. “Me, not some malignant tumor.” To which he adds, as an afterthought: “I am the most malignant tumor of all.” In Tractatus Burger makes frequent mention of Emil Mihal (E.M.) Cioran (19111995), another diarist of self-doom whose notable works include The Trouble with Being Born. Cioran’s 1973 volume is virtually an ode to both self-eradication and, paradoxically, individualism. “The right to suppress everyone that bothers us,” Cioran writes, “should rank first in the constitution of the ideal State.” Even Cioran, though, cannot help but let slip the mask of aloofness from time to time. “She meant absolutely nothing to me,” he writes. “Realizing, suddenly, after so many years, that whatever happens I shall never see her again, I nearly collapsed. We understand what death is only by suddenly remembering the face of someone who has been a matter of indifference to us.”

Antinatalism is a modern phenomenon, then. One might even call it our most pervasive modern plague. But the antinatalism that has confronted us lately in the United States is worse than an infectious disease. It is a celebration of death itself. In many ways this is not new, as antinatalism in America has often carried dark racialist and eugenicist connotations, many of which remain at least partially in view today. The rising popularity of the term “reproductive negligence,” however, indicating a tort claim against parents for the wrong of having been brought involuntarily into the world, reveals the spreading influence of antinatalist ideologies that go beyond even the antihuman horrors of our past.

Readers may remember the May 17, 2025, bombing of a fertility clinic in Palm Springs, California. This kind of murderous nihilism—applied antinatalism, one might call it, or perhaps “honest antinatalism” is better—lies along the demonic frontier of American antinatalism in our time.

The California terror attack was the work of one Guy Edward Bartkus (19992025), who committed suicide in the blast while also injuring four other people and endangering many more. Puzzled as to why someone would blow up a fertility clinic, I began researching the Palm Springs bombing and learned that Bartkus subscribed to an idea known as “efilism,” from “life” spelled backwards, an ideology dreamed up by a man named Gary Mosher. Bartkus was not the only person to resort to harming others in pursuit of Mosher’s twisted efilism ideology. In April 2025, the Long Beach Post reports, “27yearold Sophie Tinney was found shot to death in her bed in Pierce County, Washington. Tinney’s boyfriend, Lars Eugene Nelson, 29, was charged with seconddegree murder. ‘The victim may have convinced the defendant to shoot her in the head while she was sleeping,’ Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Dalton Smith told the Pierce County Superior Court. Bartkus appears to have been close friends with Tinney. [. . .] A Tumblr account linked to Tinney described the account owner as an efilist.”

Other media outlets are also becoming aware of how nefarious efilism is. The New Republic, for instance, reported in May 2025 on the “dark, nihilistic philosophy behind the IVF clinic bombing” in Palm Springs. The New Republic also noted that the “manifesto” Bartkus left behind before carrying out his terrorist bombing referenced Adam Lanza, “the 20yearold Sandy Hook shooter who [. . .] espoused a bleak, antinatalist worldview. [. . .] ‘I think that you should say, “I’m so sorry for your loss,” whenever you hear that someone is pregnant,’” The New Republic quotes Lanza as having written. Bartkus agreed with these views. Robert Westman, the Minneapolis man who carried out a hateful attack on children at Annunciation Catholic School in August 2025, referenced Lanza in his own manifesto, and was also “linked to online dark extremist groups fixated on nihilism,” among which were satanic networks and “No Lives Matter.”

These movements, and the antihuman ideologies that underlie them, are spreading rapidly in the United States. In December 2024, The New York Times carried a story about a Virginia man named Brad Spafford, on whose Norfolkarea farm the FBI found “the largest cache of ‘finished explosive devices’” ever discovered in the history of the Bureau. Investigators also found pipe bombs “stuffed in a backpack that bore a patch shaped like a hand grenade and a logo reading ‘#NoLivesMatter.’” A March 2025 article in Wired describes No Lives Matter as a “splinter group” of “the network of young sadists, misanthropes, child predators, and extortionists known as Com and 764,” whose members’ works include “online extortion[, . . .] crimes related to child sexual abuse material[, . . ] knifings, killings, firebombings, driveby shootings, school shootings, and murderforhire plots in North America and Europe.” No Lives Matter, Wired continues, quoting the group’s manifesto, “‘idolizes death’ and ‘seeks the purification of all mankind through endless attacks.’” No Lives Matter’s affiliates, Com and 764, are satanist groups so pervasive in America that federal authorities “have come across related cases [i.e., related to Com and 764] in every field office in the US.” Peter Savodnik of The Free Press wrote that the kinds of people who, like Minneapolis gunman Robert Westman, go on rampages out of a “conviction that life is meaningless; that words like truth, justice and God are empty slogans; that everything must be razed” are so common now that in 2025 “the FBI introduced a new category of criminal: the Nihilistic Violent Extremist, or NVE. [. . .] NVEs kill simply because they want to kill.”

Benatar would of course disavow all of this. He does not call for violence and is in fact explicitly against it. In his work he stresses that humans often kill one another, citing this as one reason not to bring people into the world and risk suffering violent crimes. Most philosophydepartment antinatalists seem to share Benatar’s moral convictions. Indeed, being against suffering is what motivates this kind of highbrow antinatalism in the first place.

But there is a contradiction at the heart of antinatalism that undoes whatever ostensibly noble motives might lead one to believe that human life should not be. Opposing murder is certainly laudable, but it does not follow from “Thou shalt not kill” that “Thou shalt not give birth.” It is true that humans do unspeakable things to one another. And yet, our inhumanity does not invalidate our interconnectedness. Murder does not erase our shared humanity. Rather, it is a futile attempt to deny it. Because of people like Robert Westman, Adam Lanza, and other antihuman terrorists who think that human beings are better off not having existed, there are parents, siblings, grandparents, and friends who grieve for lost loved ones. Nonexistence is not a calculation that can be made in a vacuum. Our lives are not our own. We live and die for the other. Human beings have always known that life is hard and that suffering is the lot of all who see the light of day. But almost all of us have chosen to live anyway. Not because we expect the pleasure that might await us to cancel out some of our pain. But because there are others whose certain pain, should we no longer exist, stays our hands and opens our hearts once more to the gift of life we have been given.

NOTES

1. See, for example, Farhad Ali and Ahmad Hassan Khattak, “Islam, Atheism, and Antinatalism: A Critical Analysis,” Journal of Humanities, Social and Management Sciences, vol. 2, no. 2 (2021), 228239; Elizabeth Barber, “The Case against Children: Among the Antinatalists,” Harper’s, vol. 348, no. 2086 (2024), 6369; and Johannes Kaminski, “Thanatological Revenants,” in Lives and Deaths of Werther: Interpretation, Translation, and Adaptation in Europe and East Asia (Oxford, UK: The British Academy/Oxford University Press).

2. Sophocles, “Oedipus at Colonus,” tr. F. Storr: http://classics.mit.edu/Sophocles/colonus.html

3. Sophocles, “Oedipus at Colonus,” tr. Richard Jebb: https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?d oc=Perseus:abo:tlg,0011,007:1225

4. “al-Ma’arri,” Encyclopedia Britannica https://www.britannica.com/biography/alMaarri

5. See, e.g., Duncan B. MacDonald, “The Original Form of the Legend of Job,” Journal of Biblical Literature, vol. 14, nos. 1 & 2 (1895), p. 68. On al-Ma’arrī’s religious skepticism see also Patricia Crone, “Post-Colonialism in Tenth-Century Islam,” Der Islam, vol. 83, no. 1 (2006), p. 27.

6. Thaddeus Metz, “Contemporary AntiNatalism, Featuring Benatar’s Better Never To Have Been,” South African Journal of Philosophy, vol. 31, no. 1 (2012), p. 1.

7. Thaddeus Metz, “Contemporary AntiNatalism,” op. cit., p. 1, citing Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 1968).

8. See Fumitake Yoshizawa, “Antinatalism Is Incompatible with Theory X,” Bioethics, vol. 38 (2024), p. 115.

9. See Brian McLean, “What’s So Good about Non-Existence? An Alternative Explanation of Four Asymmetrical Value Judgments,” Journal of Value Inquiry.

10. David Benatar, Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence (Oxford, UK: Oxford/Clarendon Press, 2006), p. 30. See also Rivka Weinberg, “Is Having Children Always Wrong?,” South African Journal of Philosophy, vol. 31, no. 1 (2012), 2632, 3637.

11. Masahiro Morioka, What Is Antinatalism? And Other Essays: Philosophy of Life in Contemporary Society (2E) (Tokyo: Tokyo Philosophy Project, 2024), pp. 14, 85.

12. Théophile Giraud, “Antinatalism in Early Christianity,” in Kateřina Lochmanová, ed., History of Antinatalism: How Philosophy Has Challenged the Question of Procreation (no publication place or publisher given, 2020), p. 69.

13. Théophile Giraud, “Antinatalism in Early Christianity,” op. cit., pp. 6970.

14. Théophile Giraud, “Antinatalism in Early Christianity,” op. cit., p. 81, citing Luke 23: 2729.

15. Théophile Giraud, “Antinatalism in Early Christianity,” op. cit., pp. 8284, citing St. Augustine,

De Bono Coniugali: De Sancta Virginitate (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2001), p. 23.

16. Christopher Janaway, Essays on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche: Values and the Will of Life (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2022), p. 162, citing Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt as Wille und Vorstellung (1E) (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1819), Arthur Schopenhauer, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Arthur Hübscher (Mannheim: F.A. Brockhaus, 1988), and Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. III, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance (Edinburgh, UK: T. & T. Clark, 1958), p. 337. Emphasis in original.

17. Karim Akerma, “Kurnig and His NeoNihilism: The First Modern Antinatalist,” in Kateřina Lochmanová, ed., History of Antinatalism, op. cit., p. 132, citing Kurnig, Der NeoNihilismus:

AntiMilitarismus—Sexualleben (Ende der Menschheit) (2E) (Leipzig: Verlag von Max Sängewald, 1903), p. 42.

18. Karim Akerma, “Kurnig and His NeoNihilism,” op. cit., p. 126, citing Kurnig, Der NeoNihilismus, op. cit., “last page.”

19. See J. Robbert Zandbergen, “Between Iron Skies and Copper Earth: Antinatalism and the Death of God,” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, vol. 56, no. 2 (2021), and Pianolaconalbedrio, “Dancing with Dionysus: Festivals, Revelry, and Transformative Joy in Nietzsche’s Universe,”

Intempestive Meditations, March 30, 2025 https://intempestivemeditations.wordpress.com/2025/03/30/ dancingwithdionysusfestivalsrevelryandtransformativejoyinnietzschesuniverse/

20. Julio Cabrera, “Antinatalism and Negative Ethics,” in Kateřina Lochmanová, ed., History of Antinatalism, op. cit., pp. 168170. See also Julio Cabrera, “Impossibilidades da moral: filosofia da existência, naturalismo e ética negativa,” Filosofia Unisinos, vol. 13, no. 2 (2012), pp. 296310.

21. See Julio Cabrera, Discomfort and Moral Impediment: The Human Situation, Radical Bioethics, and Procreation (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019).

22. Benatar does, however, mention the passages by Job and Jeremiah cited above, and also points out the diversity of Biblical, Talmudic, and other religious views on the question of procreation. Benatar, Better Never To Have Been, op. cit., pp. 221223.

23. Andrew Willard Jones, Before Church and State: A Study of Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2017).

24. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Third Part, Question 1, Article 3, Reply to Objection 3 https://www.newadvent.org/summa/4001.htm

25. David Benatar, Better Never To Have Been, op. cit., p. 179.

26. Ema SullivanBissett, “Better to Return Whence We Came,” Journal of Value Inquiry, vol. 56 (2022).

27. David Benatar, Better Never To Have Been, op. cit., pp. 183184.

28. David Benatar, Better Never To Have Been, op. cit., p. 83, using John Rawls’ (19212002) example of the grass-counter.

29. David Benatar, Better Never To Have Been, op. cit., p. 83.

30. Nick Rommel, “Jury Clears Wisconsin Hospital of Malpractice Charges in Death of Grace Schara,” Wausau Pilot & Review, June 22, 2025 https://wausaupilotandreview.com/2025/06/22/juryclearswisconsinhospitalofmalpracticechargesindeathofgraceschara

31. Rebecca Terrell, “Trial of the Century Reveals Medical Fascism,” The New American, August 2025, pp. 2829.

32. Rebecca Terrell, “Trial of the Century,” op. cit., p. 36.

33. Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II), Love and Responsibility, tr. H.T. Willetts (New York, NY: Straus & Giroux, Inc.: 1981), p. 145. Emphasis in original.

34. Pope John Paul II, Love and Responsibility, op. cit., p. 121. Emphasis in original.

35. David Benatar, Better Never To Have Been, op. cit., pp. 8186, Thaddeus Metz, “Does the Lack of Cosmic Meaning Make Our Lives Bad?,” The Journal of Value Inquiry, vol. 56 (2022), p. 38, and Kirk Lougheed, “Benatar and Metz on Cosmic Meaning and Antinatalism,” The Journal of Value Inquiry, vol. 59 (2025).

36. Benatar himself later recognized this, although he did not, to my mind, overcome the complication. See Nicholas Smyth, “What Is the Question to which AntiNatalism Is the Answer?,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, vol. 23 (2020), pp. 7475.

37. See Christine Overall, “My Children, Their Children, and Benatar’s AntiNatalism,” The Journal of Value Inquiry, vol. 56 (2022), pp. 5556. See also Elizabeth Brake, “Review of Christine Overall, Why Have Children? The Ethical Debate (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012),” Ethics, vol. 123, no. 2 (January 2013).

38. See, e.g., Matti Häyry, “If You Must Give Them a Gift, Then Give Them the Gift of Nonexistence,” Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, vol. 33, no. 1 (2024), pp. 4859, Nandita Bajaj and Kirsten Stade, “Challenging Pronatalism Is Key to Advancing Reproductive Rights and

a Sustainable Population,” Population and Sustainability, vol. 7, no. 1 (2023), and, more generally, George Rossolatos, “On the Discursive Appropriation of the Antinatalist Ideology in Social Media,” The Qualitative Report, vol. 24, no. 2 (2019).

39. Stephanie Peebles Tavera, “Speculative Genealogies: Global Infertility and the Biopolitics of the Fertility Dystopia,” Legacy, vol. 40, nos. 1 & 2 (2023).

40. Jenna Healey, “Rejecting Reproduction: The National Organization for NonParents and Childfree Activism in 1970s America,” Journal of Women’s History, vol. 28, no. 1 (2016), p. 131.

41. See Aaron Matz, “Hardy and the Vanity of Procreation,” Victorian Studies, vol. 57, no. 1

(Autumn 2014).

42. Matti Häyry, “Virtual Reality as an Alternative to Reproduction,” Discover Artificial Intelligence, vol. 5, no. 3 (2025), p. 1 https://doi.org/10.1007/s44163024002206

43. Irina E. Kalabikhina and Evgeny P. Banin, “Database ‘Childfree (Antinatalist) Communities in the Social Network VKontakte’,” Population and Economics, vol. 5, no. 2 (2021).

44. Paddy McQueen, “A Defence of Voluntary Sterilisation,” Res Publica, vol. 26 (2020), p. 253.

45. Hermann Burger, Tractatus LogicoSuicidalis: On Killing Oneself, tr. Adrian Nathan West (Cambridge, MA: Wakefield Press, 2022), p. 78.

46. E.M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born, tr. Richard Howard (New York, NY: Skyhorse Publishing, 2012), published originally in French in 1973 as De l’inconvénient d’être né. See also Ştefan Bolea, “Antihumanism in the Works of E.M. Cioran and Thomas Bernhard,” Philobiblon: Transylvanian Journal of Multidisciplinary Research in Humanities, vol. 24, no. 1 (2019).

47. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born, op. cit., p. 127.

48. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born, op. cit., p. 51.

49. See, e.g., Susan L. Thomas, “Race, Gender, and Welfare Reform: The Antinatalist Response,” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 28, no. 4 (March 1998), and Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, “The PreHistory of the Holocaust? The Sonderweg and Historikerstreit Debates and the Abject Colonial Past,” Central European History, vol. 41 (2008), p. 501, citing inter alia Gisela Bock, “Antinatalism, Maternity, and Paternity in National Socialist Racism,” in Gisela Bock and Pat Thane, eds., Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States, 1880s1950s (London, UK: Routledge, 1990).

50. Khiara M. Bridges, “Beyond Torts: Reproductive Wrongs and the State: Review of Dov Fox, Birth Rights and Wrongs: How Medicine and Technology Are Remaking Reproduction and the Law (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019),” Columbia Law Review, vol. 121 (2021). See also Joona Räsänen and Matti Häyry, “Editorial: Antinatalism: Solving Everything Everywhere All at Once?” Bioethics, vol. 37 (2023), p. 829.

51. Doug Kari, “Efilism, the Ideology behind the Palm Springs Bombing, Has Been Spread Online for Years,” Long Beach Post, May 31, 2025.

52. On efilism and antinatalism see, e.g., Connor Leak, “AntiNatalism and (The Right Kinds of) Environmental Attitudes,” Res Publica, vol. 31 (2025).

53. Doug Kari, “Efilism,” op. cit.

54. Indigo Oliver, “The Dark, Nihilistic Philosophy behind the IVF Clinic Bombing,” The New Republic, May 24, 2025.

55. Indigo Oliver, “The Dark, Nihilistic Philosophy,” op. cit.

56. “Minnesota Trans Killer of Catholic Schoolchildren Inspired by ‘Secret Satanic Network’: Report,” The Post Millennial, August 29, 2025.

57. Alan Feuer, “F.B.I. Says It Found Largest Cache of Homemade Explosives in Its History at Va. Farm,” New York Times, Dec. 31, 2024.

58. Alan Feuer, “F.B.I. Says,” op. cit.

59. Ali Winston, “The Violent Rise of ‘No Lives Matter’,” Wired, March 12, 2025.

60. Ali Winston, “The Violent Rise of ‘No Lives Matter’,” op. cit.

61. Ali Winston, “The Violent Rise of ‘No Lives Matter’,” op. cit., “Leaders of 764 Arrested and Charged for Operating Global Child Exploitation Enterprise,” Press Release, United States

Attorney’s Office, District of Columbia, April 30, 2025, Steven Vago and Steve Janoski, “An Inside Look at the ‘Satanic, NeoNazi’ Pedophile Cult that Ensnared NYC Man Arrested on Gun Charges,” New York Post, September 28, 2023.

62. Peter Savodnik, “Robin Westman and the Rise of American Nihilism,” The Free Press, August 28, 2025 https://www.thefp.com/p/robinwestmanandtheriseofamericannihilismminneapolisshooting

63. David Benatar, Better Never To Have Been, op. cit., pp. 9091.

64. Philosopher Robert Nozick (19382002) developed a similar argument in his work on “transcending limits.” See Thaddeus Metz, “Does the Lack of Cosmic Meaning Make Our Lives Bad?,” The Journal of Value Inquiry, vol. 56 (2022), p. 39, and Thaddeus Metz, “Recent Work on the Meaning of Life,” Ethics, vol. 112, no. 4 (July 2002), p. 790, citing inter alia Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 582, 595.

 

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Original Bio:

Jason Morgan is an associate professor at Reitaku University in Kashiwa, Japan.