Antinatal

Antinatal (pronounced ant-t- neytl)

A philosophical position that asserts a negative value judgment towards birth.

1968:  The construct is anti- + natal.  Anti is from the Ancient Greek ἀντι- (anti).  Natal is from the Latin nātālis (natal), from nātus, the perfect active participle of nāscor (I am born), derived from the earlier gnāscor, from the Proto-Italic gnāskōr, from the primitive Indo-European ǵenh.  It was cognate with the Ancient Greek γεννάω (gennáō) (to beget).  The first use of antinatal appears to be by Théophile de Giraud (b 1968) in his 2006 book L'art de guillotiner les procréateurs: Manifeste anti-nataliste although forms of anti-natalist thought appear in ancient Greek philosophy, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Manichaeism. It was also espoused by heretical gnostic Christian sects, such as the Bogomils, Cathars, Encratites, and Marcionites.

As an etymological point regarding the play on words, the reference is antenatal (before birth); ante a borrowing from the Latin.  As prefixes, anti- (against) should not be confused with ante- (before) but, anti- does exist as a variant spelling of ante- in some borrowed words, such as anticipate and antipasto, but cannot be used to coin English words.

Strains

Although nihilists are predictably drawn to antinatalism, it’s not really a fork of nihilism.  Instead, it’s the position that bringing someone into existence will always harm the person created, but failing to bring that person into existence will only deny them pleasures they’ll never know. Therefore, the only guaranteed way to avoid increasing the harm quotient of sentient life is for human procreation to be discontinued as a moral imperative. The inevitable consequence of this would be to hasten the extinction of the human species and within the internal logic of the counter-intuitive formulation that is antinatalism, it’s the only ethical outcome.  There’s also a legal basis suggested, drawn from the traditions of natural law, which holds that giving birth to children is inherently wrong because the child can never consent to being born.

Of the two main strains of the philosophy, misanthropic anti-natalism is the position that humans have a presumptive duty to desist from bringing into existence new members of our species because they cause harm. Ecological anti-natalism (sometimes called “environmental anti-natalism”) is a subset of this in that it holds procreation is wrong because of the environmental damage caused by human beings and the suffering we inflict on other sentient organisms.  Its structural representative is the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.

Wedding day: Leonard (1880-1969) & Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), St Pancras, London, 10 August 1912; the couple did not have children.

Philanthropic anti-natalism is the position that humans should not have children for the good of the (unborn) children because, in bringing children in the world, parents are subjecting them to pain, suffering, illness, and finally death.  Virginia Woolf, in Mrs Dalloway (1925) explored the idea through the character of Septimus Warren Smith who said “One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this way, now that.”