I wanted to know if having a kid on a burning planet was right. I found that antinatalism is seriously taboo | Life and style

15 comments

1. Attitudes on this are changing I think. Some of my 30yo friends respect the idea of not having kids as a way to reduce environmental harm. My 40yo friends don’t judge people for not having kids, but it’s not seen as a positive at all, just an arbitrary choice.

2. Did you also find that “burning” here was hyperbolic?

3. I have mixed feelings about antinatalism especially how it’s presented by David Benatar, but I think it’s so important to give serious thought to the ethics of procreation (and adoption too) even in the best case scenarios. I remember as a kid being annoying as hell toward my parents about making them answer for why they brought me here. I didn’t necessarily feel it was inherently wrong I was born, but it irked me how many adults seemed to take for granted that having children was morally neutral or even inherently good, when they clearly hadn’t even questioned it.

4. Problem is if only the people who don’t care about the environment/life on Earth procreate, then how is that likely to result?

5. Have you ever seen that graph showing fertility rate vs. climate change denialism? It doesn’t paint a pretty picture. If all the people who recognize the need for change refuse to have children, where does that leave us? There’s a movie about it called Idiocracy

6. You’re chill with me. My wife and I refuse to bring children into a corporate-burning world.

7. I loved my new grandchild even before he was born. But feel my daughter was wrong to bring another child into this mess.

8. I’m not comfortable bringing kids into the world that is coming. I get the whole influence the next generation thing, but I would prefer to not have to watch my kid experiencing a failing world and knowing I chose to create them. If I want a kid to nurture into a good human being I’ll go through the adoption process

9. Antinatalism is *intimately tied into ecofascist stuff*, and that’s why it’s taboo- you *cannot* let that kind of rhetoric take root.

10. I’m an antinatalist, but for personal reasons that I don’t apply towards others. I do think that it’s wrong to be having children this day and age, but the antinatalist groups I’ve seen are downright hateful. I don’t hate kids, I just don’t want any of my own.

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12. It’s the same phenomenon as veganism. People don’t want to imagine that they’re doing something wrong, or in this case, want to do something that could be morally abhorrent.

13. never in history people could choose to or not to have a kid.

    nowadays we think we know better than nature and rationally decide to or not to have kids.

    good that we have choices. alas the world cannot be saved by our reproductive choices. And neither can we foresee what kind of life will they have from our actual point of view

14. when i read these kind of discussions, i always think about the movie idiocracy, where the high IQ people stopped reproductive actions because they where worried about the consequences. meanwhile the mothers of the idiots were banging like there was no tomorrow

15. What really infuriates me is hearing people starting to scaremonger about population decline. Not one have I heard any of those people confront the key premise underlying their causes for concern: that the economy MUST continue to operate as it does today. If you drop this assumption – and I can see no path forward for the climate that doesn’t require dropping this assumption – then none of the arguments for maintaining population growth still hold.

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