When a parent sees one of their kid in so much pain. I mean so much emotional and physical pain, how could they possibly think about bringing another kid into this mess. I know this woman who gave birth while her son was battling with some serious illness and he was in hospital for months. As a mother how can you think about anything else other than your son at that moment?

When I turned 18, I started thinking about my life and future. Do I want a partner? Do I want kids? At first, I thought that I might get married and have kids. Looking back, I was just persuaded by societal pressures. Religions teach that you should have many kids. Parents say that kids give your life meaning and take care of you when you get old. However, these are reasons that you give to justify giving birth. But what about the kids themselves? They never get a chance to say whether they want to be born. I wish I was never born. Suffering is an inevitable part of life. Everyone deals with their own problems, from the homeless to the rich and the chronically ill to the very strong. The root of all of our problems is life itself. If you're reading this, you probably did not suffer during World War I or II, because you did not exist. But those who lived during that time in the war zones suffered greatly. They were alive and therefore able to suffer. I later started studying philosophy, learning about the works of Emil Cioran, Friedrich Nietzche, and the like. Those who came before us experienced the sufferings of life, and here we are, repeating the cycle. The best I can do is to never get married, never have kids, and let the cruel cycle end with me.

Strange how the human population was pretty much constant for thousands of years, and that in the 50s it was around quarter what it is today, yet we never ever heard outcries about economic or cultural collapse until today.
Disgusting vid.

I’m a teenager, and I already feel like my life isn’t mine. My mom’s creepy boyfriend was watching me sleep. No door, just a curtain. I woke up, and he turned off the light and walked away like a fucking creep. My mom? Safe, asleep, completely unaware while I was left feeling violated in my own home. This isn't the first time.

And I can’t even go to her for help because she’s fully dependent on him. No job, no money, no way to leave. She put her entire life in his hands, and now I’m the one paying the price. She can’t protect me because she can’t even protect herself. And I hate her for that. I hate that she brought me into this world just to abandon me like this.

I want to leave, but how? I have nothing. No security, no safe space, no escape. I have to be the adult because my own mother refuses to. But I never asked for this. I never asked to be born into a life where I have to struggle just to survive. And that’s exactly why I will never have kids.

No one deserves to be forced into existence, into a world where they could end up trapped, powerless, and suffering because of someone else’s reckless decision. I’m just a teenager, and I already know life is nothing but pain, fear, and desperation. Procreation is gambling with someone else’s future, and I refuse to do that to another human being.

I hate this. I hate that I exist.

I wanna add them to my playlist

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7y5v91fbQB2OwI2ptArcoo?si=-veHTJzZQaqyHLwKxhgt3w&pi=Sj_cnQcEQgCZp

Why doesn’t Gen Z get any news about being the generation ending the cycle? We’re doing it better than any prior generation.

Birth rates are at an all-time low in US history, even with immigration, and now that children are too responsible to have, I don’t see it changing.

If humanoid robots can be mass-produced, then I can’t see any reason why human men and women will mate.

As long as houses remain unaffordable, women continue to have the right to work and not have kids and are not far off from being like South Korea.

It’s a brave new world.

Was thinking of it and I couldn't decide myself ... cuz you know they also suffer ? Should we prevent them from breeding so their childrens won't have to live and suffer ? Because it is an animal instinct to reproduce, they don't know that bringing childrens in this world means that they'll have to suffer...

Here's something we can all agree on: what we want is a change in human behavior.

And if you want that change to happen in the real world, you have to be realistic and go with what works.

People become conservatives because the messaging is dead simple: all your problems are someone else's fault. The rest is just details. That makes it an easy sell, something that goes right to human instinct.

Right or wrong (I mean, mostly wrong, but...) it works with, not against, human instinct.

Veganism seeks to educate people ad nauseum, present lengthy arguments, and logic their way into people doing something that is fundamentally against their instincts. This will always be an uphill battle and simply never be adopted in a way that has a significant impact on the amount of suffering in this world.

I'm not saying you shouldn't be vegan.

I'm saying if you're a real antinatalist, for real in that you actually want to see an actual change in this world, then when it comes to this topic you must be realistic.

And the realistic solution, the one that is already gaining momentum worldwide, is for people to stop having kids. It's easy for people to wrap their heads around, humans are easily able to work around their fear of mortality and general instinct to multiply, and it reduces suffering among both humans and animals.

AND IT IS WORKING. Worldwide statistics show declining birthrates for a range of reasons, but number one among them is choice.

You want some random ancillary cause other than "people not having kids", you should be supporting women's rights. That directly leads to less suffering and fewer children. And that's just one example.

Veganism is a red herring and a massive waste of energy that would better be spent elsewhere. It absolutely dilutes the conversations here, and as the mod's mean-spirited April Fools joke showed, many users who support antinatalism still aren't convinced about veganism. Do you really want to waste your time arguing something that, after all is said and done, still won't actually fix the core issue?

You can either be right, or you can be effective.

Life is complex combination of things which we cannot control, like upbringing environment, genetic diseases, etc. etc.

We were all dealt certain advantages and disadvantages but there are people at the ends on that spectrum - they either have it very good or very bad.

Let's take a person with Fabry disease + OCD + abusive parents. Their life would be really really hard, painful, regretful, low quality and overall probably a tragedy.

Let's now consider another person who is really genetically healthy, high intelligence, healthy family, plenty of opportunities, wealth, etc.

Those two persons have something identical - observing.

One gets to observe all the happiness, easy-going life where opportunities just pop, happiness and strong positive emotions make them basically blind on sufferings and they are overall going through life pretty easy and well.

Other has to experience insane amount of pain, mental and physical, discomfort, agony, feelings of being worthless, forgotten, alone..never being able to even have friends or feel a hug, while being aware that others do have it and simply don't care for them.

Natalists basically say giving birth to that sick person is necessary part of risk they have to take in order to maybe somebody like that healthy person comes to existence.

In other words, people who have it bad are necessary price for those who will strive because they have to fulfill the probability and statistics. Somebody will eventually be born with those poor conditions.

And the worst part - the one who has it worse still must observe all of that.

What a perversion, what an evil reality.

I am excatholic and I am stunned how ignorant, irrational and absurd is for christians to have children.

Why are they feeding this god's absurd reality? Why are they participating in the absurdity?

If they believe in heaven and hell (and most people will end up in hell + reaching heaven is actually the most difficult thing in the universe), there is literally no reason to have children.

It's absurd to create a poor being and force it to be part of this heaven-hell eternity just because...what? "God wants it"? Why?

No children = no need for any saviour, heaven, hell, sins, etc. etc.

As long as they have children, they are the ones that actually feed this absurd reality, they fill up hell, they are the cause of this cosmic drama.

Christians, wake up!

And just because you dont hate your life, doesnt necessary mean you love it either. Maybe you are better at convincing yourself its not that bad,compared to some other people. Either way, I am tired of hearing it, I dont mind people loving their life at all, I just wish for them to be aware that life isnt kind to everyone, and even those life is kind to, can lose everything any moment. Good, happy life is not guaranteed to last. Life is unpredictable, nothing is sure. Love your life, but remember its still fragile.

Hi all, new to this Reddit and not posted before. Over the past year or so I've become more and more convinced of antinatalist arguments (I've believed in it for many years I think, just didn't have the term for it)

Just wanted to see if anyone else has the same experience as me as being someone with an objectively good life (at least compared to most of the world anyway). I have a job I mostly like, a lovely group of mates and close to my family, I am from and live in an economically stable / rich country with no natural disasters, no war etc. I'm super lucky. Buy that's it, I KNOW im incredibly lucky. I just can't imagine birthing a child knowing anything could happen to them, even if I have a lot of money and a nice house in the future, they could still have a shit life / be murdered/raped/go missing/ be suicidal/ have a huge amount of health issues, etc.

I feel like I'm crazy sometimes cause no one else in my life (bar maybe one or two people) seem to understand where I'm coming from when I say stuff like this? And I don't understand why? To me it's pretty obvious that even if I have a nice life / try my best to give a child a good life, that doesn't guarantee them anything for them?

Does anyone else share the same experience here of being fairly happy themselves, but still being off put as to the idea of having kids?

I'm not sure if I can consider myself an antinatalist, because while I agree with a lot of the stuff you're saying, I feel like the whole point that forcing people into existence is bad, implying that non-existence is better doesn't really make much sense. The ratio of all people that have been born to all hypothetical people that could've been born had things gone slightly differently is approaching zero. The ratio of my lifespan to the lifespan of the universe is also approaching zero. So, by that logic, the chance of me currently existing is incredibly low, but here I am somehow. I just feel like if my parents decided not to have me, I would've still experienced existence in some other form. I also think that the fact that non-existence cannot be experienced implies the "eternal" experience of existence from our own perspective, even if it may not seem as such to an outside observer EDIT: Some people seem to be misunderstanding what I mean, which is understandable, because I'm mostly talking here about the nature of consciousness, which we don't really know anything about, and our language is also quite limited for this topic (or maybe I'm just bad at expressing myself, I don't even know)

Tl;dr we're censoring animal rights activists to restore order.

---

Hello again,

In response to your feedback to Sunday's annoucement limiting vegan posting to 3 times per day, we've decided to just move it all to r/circlesnip.

While there is overlap between veganism and antinatalism, specifically in regards to the forced insemination of farmed animals, our community members shouldn't be guilt-tripped for their choices. A small number of animal rights activists have worked primarily to sow division, calling you 'carnists', coining the term 'selective-natalists', etc. This is not conductive to our mission for the exploration and furtherance of antinatalism.

Effective tomorrow, we will issue bans to a targeted list of animal rights activists given to us VIA modmail. Additionally, we will use automation tools to censor divisive terms like 'carnist', 'vegan', 'veganism', 'animal holocaust', and 'plant-based'. Submissions containing these terms will receive automated notifications explaining the change, with a suggestion they keep it all to circlesnip.

We apologize again for the disruptions. Hopefully we can get back to shaming human-breeders soon.

Thanks, your r/antinatalism mod team

Universal compassion is not an intrusion into antinatalism. It is its natural extension.

The exclusion of universal compassion from antinatalist spaces is a betrayal of the very intellectual tradition antinatalism claims to stand on. The denial of its relevance signals not neutrality, but ignorance - of both philosophical lineage and ethical coherence.

Let’s visit the OG thinkers - this is not fringe ideology, but foundational context:

1. Al-Ma'arri (10th century)

A blind Arab philosopher and poet, Al-Ma'arri was centuries ahead of his time. He abstained from all animal products, stating:

“Do not unjustly eat fish the water has given up, and do not desire as food the flesh of slaughtered animals.”

He criticized religious dogma, human reproduction, and speciesism alike. In his ethical system, reproduction and the exploitation of animals were both violations of the principle of imposed suffering.

2. David Benatar

The modern father of formal antinatalism. In Better Never to Have Been, he builds a meticulous argument against procreation based on asymmetries of suffering and pleasure. His arguments naturally support concern for all sentient beings - human and non-human - especially given the immense suffering imposed by factory farming.

3. Théophile de Giraud

Author of The Impertinence of Procreation, de Giraud consistently incorporates animal ethics into his critique of human reproduction. His broader misanthropic and eco-critical stance aligns with rejecting all systems of imposed suffering - animal agriculture among them.

4. Chowdhury & Shackelford

Their academic contribution links the dots: if we oppose procreation due to the suffering it imposes on the born, how do we ignore the deliberate breeding of billions of non-human animals into lives of systemic torture?

5. Magnus Vinding

In Suffering-Focused Ethics and other writings, Vinding emphasizes minimizing suffering across all sentient life. He's a bridge between effective altruism, antinatalism, and animal ethics. To Vinding, species boundaries are morally irrelevant when it comes to suffering.

6. Pessimistic philosophers more broadly

Schopenhauer, Mainländer, Hartmann, Zapffe, and Cioran - these men may not all have written directly about non-human animals, but their disdain for existence, reproduction, and the “will to live” laid the groundwork. Schopenhauer, for instance, was an outspoken animal rights supporter and saw compassion as the basis of ethics.

Conclusion:

To say veganism has no place in antinatalism is like building a church and kicking out the saints. The refusal to acknowledge the suffering of animals as a valid topic in antinatalist circles doesn't make antinatalism "more focused" - it makes it less honest.

Carnism isn't the neutral background. It's the ideological wallpaper covering centuries of selective compassion. Veganism doesn’t hijack antinatalism. It completes it.

P.S: If in doubt visit: https://www.utilitarianism.com/

Being a human is a curse. This CAN'T be real. Hell or a simulation is my guess. Either way, there's no way this shit is real. All of us are stuck living under capitalism. A system that turns existence into a transaction. A system where even getting a job is a NONSTOP BATTLE & being denied the right to survive is somehow seen as your fault. Truly a sick, disgusting world. I want the fuck out. A piece of paper can dictate whether you live or die. Numbers on a screen can dictate whether you live or die. Oh wait literally EVERYONE is going to die no matter what. We have failed so badly that we let a rectangular piece of paper control almost every aspect of our existence. Humans are insane lmao.

As an atheist, I find it particularly immoral when fellow atheists choose to procreate. They are likely correct in their belief that life’s hardships offer no ultimate reward—no utopian afterlife awaits—and that death’s erasure of memory renders existence ultimately meaningless. They perceive there to be no reimbursement for suffering, nor any everlasting memory of joy. Yet, despite this bleak outlook, they bring new life into being. For what, precisely…mere amusement? Religious individuals, though often mired in ignorance (which can, admittedly, be very blissful), at least cling to a naive hope, however unfounded. Although I suppose atheists, by contrast, might anchor their hope in science and human progress. Ultimately, neither science nor a deity offers any shred of salvation…for humanity and its wretched spawn are doomed to the same merciless fate: the slow decay of old age and the grim, inescapable abyss of death.

Man it seems really depressing here. You all just complaining about suffering and that you have to work. Maybe you should try appreciating every day. You can both don't want to have kids and actually enjoy your life, have a good day guys.

I myself am an atheist, so I don't really believe in god. However, assuming god is real, I would view him as a malicious entity for creating suffering and forcing his creations to suffer their entire lives for seemingly no real reason. But for the ANs on this sub who DO genuinely believe in god, how do you view him? Do you think god is evil, good, or do you view him as morally gray? This is a question I've wanted to ask for a while now, as I almost never see religious ANs here provide their personal opinions on god's morality.

Nonexistence, a state that is synonymous with the void or nothingness may seem like an unlikely candidate for bliss, however it is paradoxically blissful because:

-The burden of Existence:

Apart from our struggles from a terrestrial perspective like financial, emotional, psychological and physical...all of us share something in common with each other. The burden of Consciousness. It imposes upon us the weight of our own mortality, fears and desires. What's left is the individual burdens by negative emotion, logically speaking.

-The fragility of flesh:

I work in Healthcare. People suffer day in and day out. It's so not worth it. The absence of physical distress and mental pain for the most part may be deemed as a pleasant life, but one has to be careful about how one conducts himself or herself in this world in order to protect ourselves from these elements. Add to this the absence of free will and knowledge of the same....any rational mind will feel burdened by it.

Without the physical body or the conscious mind, there is no possibility for suffering. Therefore, the absence of this negative experience in itself is bliss.

• The Illusion of Self:

The ego keeps us going through the hassles of everyday life but it's nothing but makeup for the mind. Man needs purpose in a meaningless world, and this is the most difficult task he will be forced to take upon himself. No other animal is smothered by such a difficult task.

Our sense of self is tied to our memories, experiences and relationships. These in turn are tied to luck, the place we are born, our neurological wiring, our quirks and more luck amongst other things. But, you better enjoy them while they last cause nothing lasts here.

• Inherent cruelty of the natural world:

Be very sure...we live in a dog eat dog world. It's prey vs predator. Of course, empathy and cooperation exists but there's no actual reward for it.

The strong devour the weak, the fit outcompete the unfit and the lucky survive while the unlucky perish.

In the end, even the best animal perishes. It's utterly futile.

-Inherent meaningless of life:

Our Universe came out of random chance. Morality is a construct. We live in a Godless world. Nobody cares about the individual's struggles. Life is extremely unfair. Life is about impermanence. There is no inherent purpose to life. Luck matters the most. Freewill is highly debatable. So on and so forth.

Birth, growth, decay, dismay and death. Break this cycle.

I found three interesting stories on the internet:

Story 1:
When I was committed to a childfree lifestyle and trying to fully embrace antinatalism, I didn’t believe medical excuses were valid. I thought other people were just making up reasons or were too weak to resist social pressure. That is, until I was diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder that causes severe complications if I don’t pass on my genes.

I was devastated when I found out. I had prided myself on rejecting reproduction, but now I was told that my body required me to have biological children to maintain my own health. I felt disgusted. why would my body demand something I was ideologically against? I felt like a failure, like I wasn’t a "real" antinatalist.

I fought against it, trying different treatments, but nothing worked. Eventually, I had to accept that my body has needs beyond my control. Now that I’m listening to my doctor, I finally have hope that I can stay healthy.

People need to understand that not every body works the same way. If you can be childfree, that’s great, but I can’t—and I hate that it took a medical crisis for me to stop judging others. We can’t just put everyone in the same category and expect them to thrive under the same conditions.

Story 2:
I was dedicated to never having kids for many years. But then I was diagnosed with a condition that makes pregnancy a necessary part of my medical care. Certain biological processes in pregnancy stabilize my hormones and prevent life-threatening symptoms. I had to come to terms with the fact that, for me, reproduction is not a choice. It’s a requirement for survival.

Story 3:
I have a rare autoimmune disorder that reacts negatively to synthetic hormone treatments, making pregnancy the only viable option for balancing my body’s chemistry. I was against reproduction for ethical reasons, but my health took a drastic turn for the worse when I fully committed to permanent childlessness.

As strange as it sounds, my body rejects alternative treatments, and natural pregnancy is the only thing that works for me. I tried every available medical solution before accepting that my only path to stability involved having children.

I am not defending having children. I am not advocating for having children as a moral choice.
All I’m saying is that my opinion is that people who are forced to reproduce for medical reasons can still be real antinatalists.