Antinatal

Antinatal (pronounced ant-t- neytl)

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

1968:  The construct was anti- + natal.  Anti was from the Ancient Greek ἀντι- (anti).  Natal was from the Latin nātālis (natal), from nātus, the perfect active participle of nāscor (I am born),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 the Belgium author Théophile de Giraud (b 1968) in L'art de guillotiner les procréateurs: Manifeste anti-nataliste ((The Art of Guillotining Procreators: An Anti-natalist Manifesto, 2006) 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.  Antinatal is an adjective and antinatalism & antinatalist are nouns; the noun plural is antinatalists.

Strains

Although nihilists are predictably drawn to antinatalism, it’s really not 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.  A legal basis has also been 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.

Structuralists call that a “consent-based deontological argument” but in common use it’s a variant of the “non-consensual harm argument”.  The structure is deontological (of or relating to ethics in the sense of “the study of principles relating to right and wrong conduct” rather than consequentialist because the focus primarily is not on outcomes (suffering, welfare, utility), but to a violation of a moral constraint (in this case the proscription on imposing a condition on another individual without their consent).  At the structural level, it may be compared with concepts such as non-consensual medical procedures (or those in which consent is deemed to be “not informed”), non-consensual risk imposition, or coercive contracts.  The general principle is that if an act in any way affects and individual in a morally significant way and the individual cannot consent, then the act should be held to be impermissible (there will in some circumstances be exceptions to this, many of them related to medical treatment).  However, as used by the antinatalists, the argument exists more as a way of drawing attention to their cause than a serious intellectual point, simply because it will always be defeated by the “impossibility-of-consent objection”, an individual prior to the point of conception being no more able to consent to being born than Oliver Cromwell’s (1599–1658; Lord Protector of the Commonwealth 1653-1658) horse.  In that sense it’s something well-beyond the legal issue of asymmetrical consent.  Given all that, it’s an interesting way to draw attention to the cause rather than a serious argument because both consent and refusal are impossible to gain and those who bother to work things to their logical conclusion tend to conclude one or both parents may be presumed to possess the power of consent by proxy.

Views do change.  In July 2023, Lindsay Lohan became a mother.

Motherhood definitely changed how Lindsay Lohan saw things but others didn’t allow the arrival of their offspring much to change their world view and sense of the place their children occupied in the hierarchy of their “possessions”.  In his diary, (edited by edited by Michael Davie (1924-2005) and published in 1976), the novelist Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) on 13 November, 1943 noted:

“There is a great deal of talk at the moment about the rocket guns which the Germans are said to have set up in France, with a range to carry vast explosive charges to London.  The fear is seriously entertained in the highest quarters.  I have accordingly given orders for the books I have been keeping at the Hyde Park Hotel to be sent to Piers Court [Waugh’s country house Stinchcombe, Gloucestershire, a wedding present from his second wife’s grandmother].  At the same time I have advocated my son [Auberon Waugh (1939–2001)] coming to London.  It would seem from this that I prefer my books to my son.  I can argue that firemen rescue children and destroy books, but the truth is that a child is easily replaced while a book destroyed is utterly eternal; but most that I have a sense of absolute possession over my library and not over my nursery.”

The “rocket guns” mentioned were the first of the Vergeltungswaffen (retaliatory weapons), the first see the earliest type of cruise missile (the V-1, later to be dubbed “buzz-bomb” or “doodlebug” by those at which they were aimed).  The early Allied speculation was novel weapons were likely to be more destructive than they proved but even so, when deployed they caused considerable damage and loss of life; they also forced the high command to alter their immediate strategic plans after the D-Day (6 June, 1944) landings in an attempt to counter the threat.  The V-1 was one of war’s most economical delivery systems, the post-war British analysis calculating that at a unit cost of Stg£125 it was able to deliver (with reasonable accuracy for its purpose), about the same bomb load as a medium bomber which (including crew) cost some Stg£10,000, men and machine both subject to damage or death.  Had more resources been devoted to developing the cruise missile to ensure it was ready for deployment by 1940, the early years of World War II (1939-1945) would likely have unfolded differently; as it was, although the V-1 and V-2 (the first ballistic missile) were the most obvious of the Nazi’s many Wunderwaffen (wonderweapons), for a variety of reasons they were not decisive although their influence in the post-war years was profound.

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.”  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 quasi-political manifestation is the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.