What could be more essential to the human experience than the creation of new life? What could be more beautiful? Having children has forever been intertwined with our human experience. From the time we’re born, the value of life is presented to us as an unquestionable truth.
We grow up thinking there can be absolutely no greater act of love and no greater happiness than to have brought new life into the world. Rarely do we stop to consider the true ethical implications.
Although there is so much beauty in life, having children isn’t as clearly on the right side of the moral line as we might imagine. In fact, like most dilemmas in this world, it lives in the grey.
I feel that the fervent intensity with which we believe in the beauty of life stems from our fear of death and the biological instinct to maintain continuity of the human species. After all, if no single person on Earth had any fear of death, would we have survived the inevitable troughs of life to make it to our contemporary age today?
We have an instinct to survive, and naturally fear dying, so we choose (often unconsciously) to ignore the perspectives that suggest that life is not completely perfect; perspectives that suggest that perhaps a non-life may be more peaceful than a living one.
Most of us have an intense drive to build a meaningful life, which links back again to our survival instincts. Kids provide that, so we choose to ignore any moral ambiguity surrounding procreation because such thoughts are too difficult to process.
We seem to perfectly accept the value of life, enough to blindly accept that the best thing, for anyone (even someone who doesn’t exist yet), is to be alive.
But is this always the case?
The immediate counterpoint to the anti-natalist view is that although life has downs, it has ups too. ‘Life is undoubtedly challenging, but there is so much joy and love, also.’ While I agree that there is so much serenity and beauty to be found in life, it is simultaneously true that an individual will inevitably know suffering – an experience just as valuable as any other, but no one can say it doesn’t hurt.
Alternatively, being unborn has the potential to provide a level of peace that life simply doesn’t offer, even in the best of cases. Because in any other state than that of life, the soul is at rest.
This view is explained by South African philosopher David Benatar in his Asymmetry Argument. Benatar explains the reality of having kids through two scenarios. In scenario A, the child is born. They will experience pain (negative) and joy (positive). In scenario B, the child is unborn. For this unborn child, there will be the absence of pleasure (neutral) and no suffering (positive).
Scenario B is justified as more morally sound, because mathematically it has better outcomes. Although there is an absence of pleasure, the child isn’t in pain because they haven’t been deprived of anything. They’ve never experienced pleasure, so there would be nothing to miss.
This perspective might simplify some of the nuances of life. We might think that despite inevitable suffering, the experience of living itself is a better outcome than not. And while I agree that life is a wonderful experience almost all of the time, it still holds true that it is just one experience, and the decision to have a child is a gamble on the outcome of it.
Of course, there is no reality in which the creation of new life will stop, nor am I arguing for one. But I do think we should be more aware of the reality of being alive, and thus make more pragmatic decisions about whether to have children.
For example, let’s look at the abortion vs foster-care debate. Say you’re a 16-year-old mother and you find out you’re pregnant with a child you know you can’t take care of. The debate asks whether it’s better to abort the child, or have the child and put them up for foster care. Antinatalism suggests that it would be better to abort the child.
According to the National Institutes of Health, kids growing up in foster care have a 37% rate of depression. In 2021–22, about 1,200 were abused in out-of-home care in Australia. Could we not even humor the possibility that abortion may be better than taking a chance on a potential child’s life?
Of course if the child was born and was given to foster care, they may very well have an extraordinarily full, beautiful life. But in this case there is not only no guarantee, there is statistical evidence that shows the likelihood of a really good quality of life would be decreased.
Can we not at least consider that being unborn is better than being brought into a world where you’ll likely experience more suffering than pleasure?
Even if you do think as a parent that the child may be placed in a good home, and so it’s still worth it to give them a chance, why take the chance at all?
I want to bring light to this issue not to shame the creation of life, or diminish its beauty. I simply want to highlight the ethical nuances that exist in the decision to have kids, and this desire comes from compassion.
We want to have kids, so we justify the creation of life as compassionate, but life isn’t always so. We shouldn’t fear the non-life, but think of it rather as a different experience. With this understanding, we should be making decisions about whether to have kids based on what is really best for them.
Maybe the kindest thing we can do is not just to give life, but to really consider whether that is the best thing to do.
