In the first days after the election of Donald Trump in November 2024, the purchases of emergency contraceptives shot up, and two companies reported sales approximately 1000% higher than those of the previous week.
Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood reported a 760% increase in IUD appointments the next day of his victory.
Many Americans fear that the incoming government can further restrict reproductive rights, two and a half years after the United States Supreme Court annulled the constitutional right to abortion.
Today, approximately one third of the states prohibit the procedure almost completely or after the first six weeks of pregnancy, before many women and girls know that they are pregnant.
Several candidates from the Trump’s second administration oppose the right to abortion. However, some of their allies have suggested that not having children is in itself a moral defect.
In a 2019 speech, for example, the elected vice president JD Vance said that people “adhere more to their communities, their families and their country because they have children.” In 2021, he tweeted that the low birth rates “have turned many elite members into sociopaths.”
During a Trump rally in 2024, the governor of Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said that her children are a “permanent reminder of what is important” and “keep me humble.” Kamala Harris, who has two steps, but no biological son, “has nothing to keep her humble,” Sanders said.
Beyond politics, many people share similar opinions. From the New York Times Ross Douthat columnist to Pope Francis, they have described the decrease in birth as a sign of egocentric cultures.
Many people without children want to have them, but they can’t. Other people may not love them for personal or economic reasons. But the defenders of “antinatalism”, a relatively new social movement, argue that giving birth is immoral.
The antinatalists that I have interviewed reject the idea that the lack of children is selfish. They believe they are protecting their children not born, not neglecting them: that the lack of children is the ethical option.
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Then and now
In the 1970s, the term “antinatalism” referred to the policies designed to reduce the fertility rate of a country, such as the campaign to sterilize millions of men in India during the state of emergency from 1975 to 1977. These policies were designed to address concerns about overpopulation and poverty, partly driven by the growing environmental awareness.
In the following decades, niche environmental movements such as the voluntary human extinction movement were influenced by this trend and encouraged people to stop having children for the good of the planet.
However, antinatalism began to denote a moral philosophy in 2006, when two key books were published: “The art of guillotine the procreators”, by the Belgian activist Théophile of Giraud, and “better ever to have been”, of the South African philosopher David Benatar.
Instead of emphasizing the damage that new humans cause to the planet, this new antinatalism emphasizes the damage that life brings not born. By not having children, these philosophers argue, people help not born to avoid the inherent pain of life.
Not born cannot experience the pleasures of life, but as Benatar writes, “those who never exist cannot be deprived of them.”
Antinatalism became popular in various online communities, but reached a broader audience in 2019, when Raphael Samuel, a Mumbai businessman, tried to sue his parents for having given him birth without his consent. This maneuver caused a public debate about the ethics of procreation and promoted the formation of the india Childfree activist group.
Since then, several antinatalist groups have been formed worldwide, including a subnet with about 230 thousand members. Stop Having Kids, founded in the United States in March 2021, has organized demonstrations in Canada, Bangladés and Poland.
That same year, Asagi Hozumi and Yuichi Furuno created Antinatalism Japan and since 2023 have organized frequent dissemination events in Tokyo. At the beginning of 2024, Israeli activist Nimrod Harel planned a European tour to promote antinatalism in more than 30 cities.
Participation in the future
The criticism of the antinatalists are diverse. However, more frequently, antinatalists complain that they are close to selfish: that critics assume that prioritize their own freedom over the upbringing of the next generation.
“I never understood those who say that ‘not having children is selfish,” wrote an antinatalist in the chat of his community. “Tell me a reason why you have children for the good of the child.”
Deciding not having children can be motivated by the desire for freedom and self -realization, but it does not have to be. Often, among the online antinatalist communities I study, the goal of not having children is precisely to protect them.
Shyama, a Bengaluru antinatalist, India, used to teach low -income children. After witnessing the effects of Covid-19 pandemic on its students, he hopes to devote himself professionally to children’s mental and adolescent health research.
He talks about their own children, but only in hypothetical terms, after having sworn not to have them. When you read bad news, you feel relieved that your children never have to suffer like that. He refuses to be born for them. When her friends accused her of questioning other people’s right to have a child, she told me that “this was less unfair than bringing another life to this world and imposing a lifetime of inevitable suffering.”
Some critics respond that having children gives parents a participation in the future. The philosopher Samuel Scheffler, for example, argues that having children customizes the future, anchoring parents in a community that extends beyond their own lives.
However, antinatalists refuse to equate children with a better future. Anugraha Kumar, a Marxist antinatalist, told me that most leaders of the Indian Communist Party have no children. Without maintaining a family, they are free to fight for a better future.
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Secularize birth
Throughout history, catastrophic events have caused reflection on the ethics of reproduction. After the holocaust and atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Jewish and Japanese writers documented the apprehension of some survivors before childbirth.
According to anthropologist Jade Sasser, anxiety for climate change, economy and political instability have fed current questions about whether it is advisable to form a family.
But I have argued that this narrative minimizes deeper changes in the way in which many modern societies understand birth.
Traditionally, birth was often considered an element linked to religion: something predestined or even determined by divine intervention. However, in many of the societies where antinatalist groups have formed, parents have much more control over whether to give birth, when already who, and the birth is conceived more secularly.
Birth is not usually considered part of a divine order, but is usually compared to a lottery: a game of chance where parents throw a dice and their children suffer the consequences.
Japanese antinatalists, for example, sometimes compare their birth with the “Gachapon”: vending machines that spit a random toy every time someone introduces money.
The parents choose to “turn to the wheel of life,” a Philadelphia antinatalist told me, without knowing what kind of life they will create. Without a way of obtaining the consent of the unborn, he added: “This is not a risk that we can run.”
*Jack Jiang is a doctoral student in Anthropology at The New School
This article was originally published in The Conversation
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