A fertility clinic in Palm Springs, California, was severely damaged by a car bomb late last week, in what authorities are calling a deliberate terrorist attack. News reports have attributed the bombing to Guy Edward Bartkus, an emotionally troubled 25-year-old who appears to have been killed in the blast. Bartkus left behind social media posts and videos in which he expressed the intention to commit suicide in just such a manner, and described himself as an "antinatalist."
Unlike the "child-free" movement, which objects to making people feel guilty for choosing not to have children, antinatalists believe no one should have children, arguing that the world is "unjust," life brings suffering, and those not yet born cannot consent to being brought into existence; therefore, it is unethical to bring them into existence.
While recent headlines are prompting national conversations about this fringe ideology, it has actually been around for some time. Today.com published an article online last September in which a number of antinatalists were interviewed about their beliefs and reasoning. Reading the piece, a number of things stand out:
First, there is a remarkable disconnect between the antinatalists' purported worldview and their personal experience. Two of those interviewed -- "Ana" and "Mark" -- have families and children that they love, but maintain that the world would be better if those children did not exist.
Second, the antinatalists' views about "suffering" are intellectually stunted, immature and myopic. While it is a natural -- and generally healthy -- desire to want to reduce human suffering, letting that impulse morph into a campaign to eliminate all "suffering" is impossible and ridiculous for reasons that should be obvious, but apparently aren't.
A) For starters, who defines what "suffering" is? What one person might view as overwhelming misery, another may see as more of a formidable challenge; you cannot superimpose your attitude about life's difficulties on anyone else, or assume that they feel the same way you would in their shoes. (Indeed, as many people can tell you, you often don't know how you yourself will react when confronted with real hardship until you actually face it.)
B) Even when facing events that most would agree are sources of great unhappiness -- the loss of a loved one, for example, or a life-threatening illness or injury -- our initial reactions to those events are not always our lifelong feelings; people heal, they adapt, they move on.
C) The impulse to eliminate all "suffering" ignores the good that comes from so many of the profound challenges we face in life, many of which make us stronger, wiser, more patient, more resilient, more sympathetic to others, more determined to solve the world's problems.
Third, antinatalism sounds more like a pathology than an ideology.
Guy Bartkus' social media posts -- if authentic -- are telling. He was depressed and felt worthless, so everyone must be worthless. He wanted to destroy himself, so he is somehow justified in destroying others.
Those interviewed in the Today.com article seem just as selfish and/or blinkered in their worldview. Ana describes herself as an "empath" whose heart is broken by human suffering, but concludes therefore that humans should not exist.
Amanda Sukenick, an activist from Chicago, describes her antinatalism as emerging from conversations about the Holocaust with her Jewish and Armenian parents. "I thought a lot about war and how conflict can't be solved if we keep creating new people," she says.
This is ahistorical nonsense. Human life on earth is dramatically better than it was 1,000 years ago or even just 100 years ago. There is less war, less suffering, less hunger, less misery. Modern humans have achieved that and more, and few of those living centuries ago could have foreseen it.
Sukenick describes her "perfect solution" to the problem of human suffering as "unplug(ging) the universe so there was nothing." If this is her takeaway from the Holocaust, she has learned the wrong lesson.
But perhaps her most telling quote is this: "There aren't children waiting in some sort of purgatory, desperate to be born. There's nobody there, so we're creating problems for no good reason."
The real message here is that humans have no souls. There is no afterlife, no God, no meaning, no real value.
It is here that the entire premise of antinatalists' argument falls apart. According to antinatalism, the human race should become extinct because life without "suffering" has more "value" than life with it; since life without suffering is impossible, life should not exist. But such a conclusion is only tenable if there is an ultimate arbiter and a universal definition of things like "worth," "value" and "meaning." A universe without a Creator has neither.
Ultimately, antinatalism is further proof that a society that abandons God eventually careens toward self-destruction. And in the case of antinatalism, destruction isn't an unintended consequence but the goal.
It is time to stop humoring the purveyors of these socially destructive ideologies.
Another timely example strengthens the point. Contemporary journalism education teaches students that the primary purpose of their profession is not investigation and objective reporting but shaping public opinion in ways journalists prefer by use of biased, incomplete or even deceitful reporting on events.
The damage this has done is incalculable. Since the 2020 presidential campaign, most of the national media actively ignored former President Joe Biden's serious, evident physical and mental health problems, and refused to challenge claims that Biden was "sharp as a tack," ask pointed questions or demand answers. Now they claim to have been misled or to have "missed" the story.
That is a monumental lie.
They deliberately chose not to investigate, because the political objective of keeping Donald Trump from the presidency was more important than telling the voting public the truth about Trump's opponent. As a result, a sick, frail and mentally incompetent man served as a mere figurehead while unelected people actually controlled one of the most powerful political positions in the world.
The question, therefore, isn't, "How could the media have missed this?" (They didn't.) Or even, "Why did the media see fit to participate in one of the worst political coverups in American history?" (We already know why.)
The real question is, "How are we going to ensure that this doesn't happen again?" And that is a question that must be asked of our educational system and other sources of popular social philosophies. Because when a warped ideology gains traction in society, it is no longer the musings of some obscure theorist looking for tenure or a shock-value book deal; it has serious real-world consequences.
Antinatalism must not be tut-tutted at, tolerated or treated as the impulses of misguided but otherwise "compassionate" individuals. It needs to be exposed for the intellectually empty philosophy it is, and the utterly destructive force it will be if it ever becomes mainstream thought.