The Trouble with Being Born

from the vault, 01.27.2023

Throughout May, I’ll publish a piece daily: an article, an advice column, an audio segment, a dispatch from the Dolphin Religion, or a case study. Each will be released first to paying subscribers, followed by a weekly email digest sent to free subscribers every Friday starting on May 9, 2025.

An edited version of this piece was originally published in UnHerd on January 27, 2023.

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“One naive pro-natalist assumption is that because death is a bad thing, procreation, which can be considered the antonym of death, is a good thing, but the naive defect in that assumption is that it ignores the obvious fact that procreation is an essential (and the ultimate cause) of death.” – Jiwoon Hwang, an antinatalist philosopher

Talk to people about their choice to abstain from having children, and “child-free” quickly becomes interchangeable with “antinatalism.”

The labels “child-free” and “antinatalist” are distinct or, at least, should be.

In the past, a person who identified as “childfree” didn’t necessarily also identify as an antinatalist. Just because they didn’t have or want to have children didn’t mean they thought other people shouldn’t. Antinatalism, on the other hand, is the belief that it’s morally wrong to have kids. To quote some memorable slogans from the antinatalist community, life might be best described as “the holocaust of survival” or, more to the point, a form of rape. From the antinatalist perspective, life is suffering, and because nobody consented to be born, it’s unethical to continue the existence of the human race. There’s possible overlap between the two—obviously—but for a long time, they were distinct. Both within their respective communities, and in the mainstream.

But as Amanda Sukenick, a self-described “antinatalist activist,” laid out on a recent podcast, the childfree and antinatalist movements are increasingly becoming one and the same. For people like Amanda, the confluence of antinatalism and “child freedom” means that the antinatalist community is losing some of its cohesion and philosophical bent. Looked at another way, as more people identify as “antinatalist,” as opposed to just “child-free,” it adds deeper shades of meaning to the decision not to have children.

Historically, organizations and communities geared towards the voluntarily childless didn’t have a cohesive philosophical or moral foundation, and they certainly didn’t proselytize. They were designed to support people who felt like they lived in a world designed for families—regardless of their reasoning. This bore out online, too. Popular online hangout spots for childfree people, like the subreddit r/childfree, which today boasts 1.5 million members, and older groups, like the popular LiveJournal community of the same name, were supposed to offer a place for people to commiserate. Even the more extreme community cf_hardcore, a spin-off of the childfree by choice LiveJournal group that was more explicitly critical of “crotch goblins,” the childfree community’s charming moniker for kids, wasn’t antinatalist per se. They just didn’t like children, as colorfully illustrated in this once-viral member post about a Harry Potter book release costume contest gone wrong.

Antinatalism has a more complicated history, though. While philosophers have kicked around the ethics of procreation (and even life itself) since Thales of Miletus—and perhaps more notably, de-growth politics experienced something of a renaissance in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s with the publication of Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, inspiring the creation of organizations like the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement—antinatalism proper only really emerged in the mid-aughts.

Antinatalism, as we know it today, was coined by philosopher David Benatar in 2006. (The Belgian writer, Theophile Giraud, unrelatedly, also came up with a similar idea around the same time, in his works, The Impertinence of Procreation and The Art of Guillotining Procreators: An anti-natalist manifesto.) For Benatar, existence is harm, and it is always morally wrong to create sentience. This idea germinated in the Blogosphere among writers like Sarah Perry, Jim Crawford, and Thomas Ligotti, but YouTube gave antinatalism its momentum.

In the mid-aughts and early 2010s, YouTube was a very different place. It was a swamp of New Atheism in its more intellectual corners, where weirdo dissidents debated one another about topics then considered too controversial for the mainstream. Among those people was Kirk Neville, known online as DerivedEnergy. According to Sukenick, DerivedEnergy introduced antinatalism to YouTube dissidents in a two-part video called “A Defence of Anti-natalism.” YouTubers started to realize that they were antinatalists; they just hadn’t had a term for it. Response videos to DerivedEnergy began to roll in—debating him, agreeing with him—and, eventually, the antinatalism community began to coalesce.

As often happens with fringe or simply non-mainstream beliefs, more extreme iterations of antinatalism also became popularized. An “antinatalist pipeline” started to form. On the least extreme end of the spectrum, you simply had people who wanted their bloodline to end with them. Next, there was “efilism,” a school of thought pioneered by Gary Mosher, known as inmendham on YouTube. Efilists don’t only subscribe to antinatalism but they believe all life is inherently negative. (Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook shooter, was inspired by efilism.)

Amanda Sukenick, arguably the most significant figure in the movement, is an antinatalist as well as an efilist. She’s admitted on video that she’s had to “talk people off the ledge” of committing acts of violence; she’s also been recorded saying that if she knew that literally all suffering would end, she would endorse that happening by any means necessary. “Literally” is an important caveat—this is a thought experiment, after all—but the desire for extinction is nonetheless meaningful. (Full disclosure, the clip linked above is removed from its original context and was published by someone who considers Sukenick an enemy.)

The next phase in the antinatalism pipeline is pro-mortalism: its most extreme expression.

Pro-mortalists are pro-death and, as was evident from the now-banned subreddit, pro-suicide. Some pro-mortalists are even pro-murder. Where people often ask antinatalists and efilists, “Why don’t you just kill yourself?” pro-mortalists provide an answer, not only through writing, but sometimes through their actions. One of its most famous advocates, Jiwoon Hwang, committed suicide. This isn’t uncommon among vocal antinatalists, either.

Self-identified pro-mortalists are few and far between, but their fingerprints are all over the more mainstream parts of the antinatalist movement, both explicitly and implicitly. Antinatalists are also passionate advocates of the right to die—that is, the right to commit suicide through voluntary euthanasia. Sukenick would say that she’s unique in that she enjoys life, and that many antinatalists do, but the community often speaks about how life is an imposition. Another telling example? When a Reddit user analyzed the browsing habits of people who posted to r/antinatalism, he found that one of the biggest crossovers was r/suicidewatch, a subreddit for people who are feeling suicidal. Other subreddits with significant overlap were r/depression, r/bipolar, and r/morbidquestions.

And it makes sense: pro-mortalism is the logical conclusion of anti-natalism. If life is suffering, why live at all?

For more about antinatalism, watch my friend Jack Boswell’s documentary here: