Anti-natalism is the philosophical value judgment that procreation is unethical or unjustifiable. Antinatalists thus argue that humans should abstain from making children. Some antinatalists consider coming into existence to always be a serious harm. Their views are not necessarily limited only to humans but may encompass all sentient creatures, arguing that coming into existence is a serious harm for sentient beings in general. There are various reasons why antinatalists believe human reproduction is problematic. The most common arguments for antinatalism include that life entails inevitable suffering, death is inevitable, and humans are born without their consent. Additionally, although some people may turn out to be happy, this is not guaranteed, so to procreate is to gamble with another person’s suffering. WIKIPEDIA
If you think, maybe for a few years, like 10-20 years, no one should make babies, and when things get better, we can continue, then you are not an anti-natalist. Anti-natalists believe that suffering will always be there and no one should be born EVER.
This photo was clicked by a friend, at Linnahall.
The argument for “you can’t consent to being born” does have a direct opposite argument: you also can’t not consent to birth. The birth is what gives the ability to consent or not in the first place. You could argue that by being anti-natalist you’re taking someone’s potential to give consent completely away, which is the same or more unethical, you’re essentially deciding for someone else that they should die/not exist without them getting a say in it?
You can do the same with suffering: life is happiness, everyone I know was happy sometime in their life (even if only as a child), so you’re doing serious harm by not allowing people to have happiness since only people who exist can be happy.
I think anti-natalism is a philosophy mainly held by very traumatized people and/or that live in very bad conditions.
We know (roughly) how to handle trauma, we know (roughly) what makes good conditions. We know roughly what makes people happy or what makes them suffer. We have the potential to create a world where being born is mostly positive for everyone.
In that sense, currently, I think mostly people that are well off should have children, ones that can actually support children properly. However, that is obviously not a permanent solution, since the end goal should be for everyone to be well off and to be able to support children.
But part of the suffering in the world is also caused by too many people. We can’t have infinite population growth while living in a world with finite resources. As such, we need to limit how many children people can have (which is already happening by availability of birth control and smarter people, able to make a choice if they want to have kids).
So in total, I don’t think birth/existence is either good or bad, but it has the potential to be both depending on how we handle it.