Nonvoluntary Antinatalism

When couples decide to create a person together, they don’t consider the dire effects on their children if they would later split up. But given that nowadays more and more couples, at some point in their life together, decide to split up, people must consider very seriously the effects that separation has on children, before they decide to create ones.

The chances of a child to go through the split up of its parents are very high.physical and social effects
Half of all children in the U.S will experience the breakup of their parents. Of these, close to half will also experience the breakup of a parent’s second marriage. And one of every 10 will experience three or more parental marriage breakups.
Researchers estimate that about 40 percent of all first marriages, about 60 percent of second marriages, and about 73 percent of all third marriages, end in divorce. The average first marriage that ends in divorce lasts about 8 years. Creating a person before marriage can increase the risk of divorce by about 25 percent.

The risk of divorce is 50 percent higher when one spouse is a child of divorced parents, and 200 percent higher when both partners are. In addition, children of divorced parents are 50 percent more likely to marry another child of divorce.

And these divorce statistics don’t accurately reflect the real numbers of children who are no longer raised in one place by two parents, as many people live apart without officially separating, and many others start a family without ever getting married, so if they split up they are not counted in the statistics. These children may not be part of the official statistics but obviously they are affected just as much, as clearly it is not the marriage part which matters but the fact that their parents are not together anymore. Having said that, this doesn’t include children of single parents, because the main trigger behind most of the effects is the parents splitting up, not that there was one parent in the first place.
Another important factor for that matter is that not all of the misfunctioning couples decide to split up. Many decide to maintain their toxic relationships and many children are being raised in a toxic environment which tremendously affects them.

Starting a family, people rarely consider the consequences of that family someday splitting up. Had people considered creating a person seriously, they would have first considered the various potential consequences of their relationship not working out very well (something that happens to most people at some point) on the person they are creating, including very serious emotional, physical and social effects.

Emotional and Mental Health

Children in the process of a divorce, go through the psychological phases which are often associated with loss, such as denial, anger, bargaining, and depression. During the denial stage, the children do not accept the separation of their parents, they keep believing that their parents will reunite.
The denial stage is often followed by the accusation phase, in which children blame their parents for ruining their life by not getting back together.
In the bargaining stage children are trying to fix the damage done by changing their own behaviors, believing that their parents have split up because of their supposed misbehavior.
During the depression stage children are depressed, tired, sad, and may have difficulty in controlling their emotions.

Children are usually aware of tension among their parents, they usually know that something is wrong. However, even children who know what divorce means, and who have witnessed the continuous tension and fights between their parents, are not really prepared for the news that their parents are splitting up. Once it breaks out, often when one parent leaves home, the child is shocked. Naturally, children miss the parent who left the family. Drifting away from a parent, even if it is an abusive one, horrifies a child.

The ongoing conflicts between the parents, even after the split up, trigger an anxiety disorder among many children. Anxiety may manifest itself in children in the form of different reactions, some children withdraw in order to avoid any worrying situation and abstain from social activities, while others develop defense mechanisms, such as retreat, rejection, repression and projection.

Generally speaking, the existence of negative factors, such as the conflicts experienced by the child within the family, the lack of communication between parents, economic difficulties and stress factors, makes it hard for children to adapt to the new stage in their lives. As a consequence of the inner conflicts they experience, they may suffer from fear, sorrow, anger, guilt, insecurity, helplessness, loss, loneliness, abandonment, rejection, sense of being unloved, and physical problems like stomachache, headache and chest pain, and psychosomatic disorders like oversleeping and overeating, particularly within the first years following the divorce. However, a study of children six years after a parental marriage breakup revealed that even after all that time, these children tended to be lonely, unhappy, anxious and insecure.

More specifically, various effects of divorce are age related:

Between Birth and Age of One
The thought that babies in their infancy will be least influenced by a divorce, assuming that they are still unaware of many things, is wrong. Prominent changes in behaviors of babies at these ages were observed after divorce. The most common ones are crying, sleep disorders, malnutrition, and the loss of interest in toys. Ignorant parents may feel free to argue in front of their babies, significantly harming them, for the short and long term.

Between the Ages of One and Three
Children find changes to be very challenging.
They are scared of separation and the visits from one parent’s home to another’s might be rather traumatic.
They may show bad temper or may cry for the other parent.
They may want to stay with one of the parents and never let it out of their sight, and when that parent attempts to go, they may desperately cling to him/her.
They may suffer from sleep disorders such as suddenly falling asleep or staying awake the whole night.

Between the Ages of Three and Five
Children fear of being abandoned.
They feel guilty, angry, nervous, scared, sad and confused.
They are concerned about whether or not they are safe or loved.
They blame themselves for the divorce.
They believe that their hostile thoughts or bad tempers caused their parents to split up.
They tend to develop tantrums, irritability, and sometimes stuttering.
They dream about the reunion of their parents.
They make futile efforts in order to unite their parents.
Behavioral regression such as wetting the bed, lapses in toilet training, thumbsucking, sleeping with a discarded doll and etc., are also common.

Between the Ages of Six and Eight
Children feel physically torn apart by loyalty conflicts.
They assume they will be deprived of food and toys or will be neglected by their parents.
They usually feel abandoned.
They may have feelings of rejection, loss, and confusion as to whom they should be loyal, along with the feelings of guilt.
They fear that they have lost the separated parent eternally, and they get scared of the idea of another person taking their place.
They often cry and show bad temper.
They feel emptiness and have difficulty concentrating at school.
They may regard the divorce as a battle requiring them to take sides.
They long for the parent living away from home and try to unite them again, and some even write notes full of love, pretending to be the other parent sending the note to his/her spouse.
They develop nervous attitudes, such as nose-picking, hair-twisting, making faces, stuttering, nail-biting and chewing pencils, and etc.
They may get furious and aggressive.
Contrary to younger ones, children at this age do not take the blame on themselves but put it on their parents. They feel rage against their elders, are disappointed and consider themselves rejected.

Between the Ages of Nine-Twelve
Children in this age feel ashamed of what’s happening in their family, they feel they are different from other children.
They may fight with their peers or just keep away from them.
They may start having nightmares.
They may get offended or nervous without knowing the underlying cause.
They may feel a sense of anger, pain, anxiety and weakness.
Emotions like the feeling of loneliness, loss and deprivation may lead to depression or other emotional problems.
Since the children at this age tend to distinguish everything as black or white, they are quite sensitive to the pressures put by their parents with respect to taking sides in the matter.
They understand the psychological states of their parents more easily and wonder whether they will be able to take care of them or not.

Between the Ages of Thirteen-Eighteen
During this period, it may be rather painful and shocking for a child to see their parents divorce.
They may show reluctance in getting involved in emotional relationships.
They experience a sense of loss and rage.
They may be scared of getting hurt, or assume that their own marriage, one day, will also fail and they may be afraid of repeating the same mistakes their parents made.
The financial matters and the psychological states of their parents worry them a great deal.
They may have difficulty concentrating at school.
They feel discomfort with their parents’ dating and sexuality.
They may experience chronic fatigue.
They may easily sink into a depression because of the fact that family is now no longer a safe harbour to rely on.
Teenagers with divorced parents are a lot more likely to experience mental health problems that will require medication, counseling, or both.
This is the age group in which divorce is mistakenly thought to have the least impact on children. Whereas, at this age, children who already carry the burden of puberty, are facing an additional stress factor with the divorce of their parents.

More generally, parents splitting up increases the risk that children would take positions which are unsuitable for their development stage. These can be emotional such as supporting one of the parents and younger siblings, or practical such as housekeeping. That is more likely in the earlier stages of the split up, when parents are usually deeply immersed in the battle between each other, and often feel hurt, furious and lonely, so they are not attentive to their children’s needs or appropriate roles in the family.

While children go through their parents’ divorce, unresolved conflict may lead to future unexpected risks. Research has shown children who have experienced divorce in the previous 20 years were more likely to participate in crimes, rebel through destructive behavior which harms a child’s health, with more children reporting they have acquired smoking habits, or prescription drug use.
Studies have also found depression and anxiety rates are higher in children of divorced parents.
A study of almost one million children in Sweden demonstrated that children growing up with single parents were more than twice as likely to experience a serious psychiatric disorder, carry out or attempt suicide, or develop an alcohol addiction.
College students whose parents were divorced were more likely to experience verbal aggression and violence from their partner during conflict resolution.
Children of divorced parents may have lower scores on self-concept and social relations.
Anxiety and depression seem to worsen after a divorce event.

Children whose family is going through divorce may have a harder time relating to others, and tend to have less social contacts. Partly, this is a result of abandonment issues that affect adult children of divorce for many years afterward. As children, they cannot make sense of why mom and dad split up, and as adults the fear of abandonment, the notion that love can simply stop, or that conflict leads to permanent separation, continues to harm them.

Children whose parents have split up develop problems trusting people. They believe that when things get rough, they would be abandoned. Many never learn skills for solving conflict in relationships. They desire intimacy and love, but the closer someone gets to them, the more terrified they are of getting hurt, or being abandoned.

The physical health of children is also highly affected. While at least some of the emotional effects of parents’ separation on children are intuitive, many of the physical effects, and mostly their prevalence and impact, are very surprising. For example it was found that children of divorced parents are at a greater risk to experience injury, asthma, headaches and speech defects than children whose parents have remained together. And in general, they are 50% more likely to develop health problems.

Social Effects

The emotional storm that children growing up with separated parents experience, as well as the significant interruption in their daily lives, very often affect their academic performance. Clearly, the more distracted children are, the more likely they are to not be able to focus on their school work.
They are more likely to have a learning disability or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder regardless of parents’ education, income, or area of residence.
They have less language stimulation.
They are more likely to have lower grade point averages (GPAs) and are more likely to repeat a year of school.
A study of eleven industrialized countries showed that children growing up with separated parents had lower math and science scores.

Teenagers are more likely to drop out of high school when their parents get divorced. This is not simply an expression of teenagers’ rebellious spirit. It can often happen because teenagers drop out of school so they can get a job and help their family to pay for rent and food.

Children of separated parents may lose economic security as custodial mothers experience the loss of 25–50 percent of their pre-divorce income. Children living with single mothers are much more likely to live in poverty than children living with both parents.

Children of separated parents may have a weakened relationship with their mothers since divorced mothers are often less able to provide emotional support as they are forced to work longer hours to support the family. Besides increased work time, loss of income may lead to a change in residence which usually also negatively affects children.

Children of separated parents may have a weakened relationship with their father because they spend much less time with him. A study found that fewer than half of children living with their mother after a divorce had seen their fathers at all in more than one year, and only one in six saw their fathers once a week.

Children of married parents attained higher income levels as adults.
Children growing up with separated parents are four times more likely to experience problems with their friends and peers.

Children growing up with separated parents tend to be sexually active at a much younger age.
Of course, this is not necessarily bad in itself, but it is bad because it is not coming from a healthy place and it is not going to healthy places. For example boys have earlier sexual debut and higher rates of sexually transmitted diseases when they have experienced divorce in their family, and girls whose fathers left the home before they were five years old were eight times more likely to become pregnant as adolescents.

I realize that considering all that may come off as a very high standard, but considering the enormous effect that parents’ separation has on children, and the high probability of parents splitting up, it must be another critical thing to seriously consider before creating a person who will anyway be significantly affected by the parents’ relationship, especially in the highly likely case of them splitting up.

The least that parents can do is avoid, by any means, dragging their children into their own battles, and overburdening their child with their own frustrations. But that’s exactly what happens very often. During the divorce process, parents experience a roller coaster of emotions to which their children are extremely sensitive, and they are often the main victims of it. Furthermore, their parenting skills are at a low ebb during the separation process, and that is exactly when their children need them the most.

There is guidance information of how to tell the child about the decision to get divorced which includes instructions such as:

• Parents should explain to their child about their decision to get divorced in a secure and familiar environment the child is used to and should act together in this.
• The child should be given detailed information as to where s/he will live after divorce, with which parent s/he is going to stay with, how often s/he can see the other parent and what sort of changes will take place in her/his life.
• While parents are having a conversation with their children, they should avoid any mutual argument, nor should they blame each other in front of the child.
• The child should never be asked to take sides in this matter, in other words, s/he should never be put in the position of a referee.
• Even if one of the parents feels hatred or rage against the other party, no negative criticisms or remarks about him/her should be made behind his/her back.
• The remarks or expressions likely to hurt the child or make him/her feel guilty should carefully be avoided.

But probably, in most cases, none of this ever happens, and in all cases, it never happens all of the time.

I tried to avoid focusing on the ugliest aspects of parents splitting up, and concentrate on the common issues of common cases of separation, but the fact that millions of children are being used by their parents as weapons against the other parent can’t be totally disregarded.
No child has ever asked to be created and no child has asked to be neglected, pushed aside, or being weaponized due to the separation of the parents.

So many harms, some surprising, at least in the sense of how significant and deeply affecting they are, yet people don’t and will not take all of that under a serious consideration.
Some of it is a result of people’s tendency to think that bad things only happen to other people and never to them, but most of it is a result of people tendency not to think at all about the consequences of their actions, no matter how dire and harmful they may be, even to their own children.

References

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Bramlett, M.D., and L.F. Radel. 2014. Adverse Family Experiences Among Children in Nonparental Care, 2011–2012. National Center for Health Statistics, n. 74, http://www. cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr074.pdf

Carlsund, A., Eriksson, U., Löfstedt, P., & Sellström, E. (2013). Risk behaviour in Swedish adolescents: is shared physical custody after divorce a risk or a protective factor? European Journal of Public Health, 23(1), 3-8. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1093/eurpub/cks011

ChildStats.gov. 2013. America’s Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being, 2013: Emotional and Behavioral Difficulties (2013). http://www.childstats.gov/americas children/health3.asp

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Edwards, A.N. 2014. Dynamics of Economic Well-being: Poverty, 2009–2001: Household Economic Studies (2014). United States Census Bureau Web Site. http://www.census.gov/prod/2014pubs/p70-137.pdf

Ellis, B.J., J.E. Bates, K.A. Dodge, D. M. Fergusson, L.J. Horwood, G.S. Pettit, and L. Woodward. 2003. Does father absence place daughters at special risk for early sexual activity and teenage pregnancy? Child Dev 74: 810–1

Emery, R. E. (1999). Marriage, Divorce, and Children’s Adjustment. (2nd ed., Developmental Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications

E. N., Song, J., J. G., Mailick, M. R., & Floyd, F. J. (2015). The relative risk of divorce in parents of children with developmental disabilities: impacts of lifelong parenting. American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. 120(6), 514-26. doi: 10.1352/1944-7558-120.6.514

Fagan, P. F., & Churchill, A. (2012). The effects of divorce on children. Marriage & religion research institute

Forehand, R., Biggar, H., & Kotchick, B. A. (1998). Cumulative Risk Across Family Stressors: Short- and Long-Term Effects for Adolescents. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology. 26(2), 119-128

Jeynes, W.H. 2001. The effects of recent parental divorce on their children’s sexual attitudes and behavior. Journal of Divorce and Remarriage 35: 125

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Strohschein, L. 2005. Parental divorce and child mental health trajectories. Journal of Marriage and Family 67: 1286

Soria, K. M., & Linder, S. (2014). Parental Divorce and First-Year College Students’ Persistence and Academic Achievement. Journal of Divorce & Remarriage, 55(2), 103-116. doi:10.1080/10502556.2013.871919

To sum my view on how human society views cases of ‘Wrongful Life’ I will address a claim which is not only very common in itself, but is also a leitmotif in other claims, and that is the ‘Sanctity of Life’ argument. This argument is echoed in the judicial statements regarding the impossibility to prove that non-existence can be better off than existence, in the argument regarding the disvaluation of life with disability, and of course in the argument that there is danger that Wrongful Life’ suits may pressure medical advisers to suggest abortions, which I have addressed respectively in the former texts regarding the issue of ‘Wrongful Life’. It also leads to the argument regarding the danger of Eugenics and of Genetic Testing, an issue I’ll mainly focus on here. If you haven’t read the former parts yet, it is recommended (though not necessary) to do so before reading this one.

Just a quick reminder, a ‘Wrongful Life’ case is when a child sues for medical negligence a doctor or hospital for failing to diagnose and/or for not informing the child’s parents about a genetic disorder or foetal impairment when abortion was still an option and would have been chosen by the parents had they been informed. The claim in a wrongful-life suit is not that the negligence of the doctor was the cause of the impairment, but that by failing to inform the parents, the doctor is responsible for the birth of an impaired child who otherwise would not have been born and therefore would not experience the suffering caused by the impairment. The lawsuit is in respect of the damage caused by the impairment, this would generally include pain, suffering, and ‘disability costs’—the extra financial costs attributable to the disability, such as the cost of nursing care.

The ‘Sanctity of Life’ argument is rather self-explanatory, to compensate a child for being born goes against the sanctity of life. It is cheapening the idea of ‘life’, and it is by far the opposite of treating life as sacrosanct.

Generally speaking, I disagree with the use of terms such as sanctity, as I don’t think that any form of saintliness exists, but for the sake of the argument, if anything, it is exactly because of the so to speak ‘sanctity of life’ that each must be treated with extreme caution. And extreme caution is certainly not to create them despite foreseen severe impairments.
To sanctify any life no matter how miserable they are expected to be is to cheapen them. It is the ones who refer to any sentient life with extreme caution, who highly consider sentient life’s vulnerability, who carry the heavy burden of moral responsibility regarding it, that really treat life as if they are sacred. It is not the ones who are trying to avoid any case of misery who are cheapening the idea of life, but rather whom who welcomes any kind of misery with open arms.
It is not whom who considers the theoretical risk of misery as a sufficient reason not to create life who disrespects it, but whom who knows that a miserable life is certain and yet insists on it.

If no person should be compensated no matter how miserable the life forced upon that person is, it means that all life is scared and must never be prevented. According to the ‘sanctity of life’ notion they are never a burden but always a blessing, even when they are experienced as the most unsacred thing imaginable by the actual people who are living it.

Claiming that life must be prevented exactly because of how vulnerable and fragile they are, is, if anything, treating it with more sanctity than forcing any of it, in any case. In a way to claim against ‘wrongful life’ cases, let alone against antinatalism, that it is by far the opposite of treating life as sacrosanct, corresponds with the silly common claim that antinatalists are nihilists despite that the opposite is true. As far as most antinatalists go, everything is morally meaningful and that’s why they want to prevent the creation of life. It is exactly antinatalists who understand more than others that everything in life is meaningful (even though most think that life is absolutely absent of any cosmic meaning, there is no contradiction as cosmic meaning and ethical meaning are different things) and therefore it all must be prevented.
In that sense, antinatalism is actually exactly the opposite of nihilism. According to it everything is morally meaningful, every harm, every frustration, every pain, every moment of loneliness, every moment of boredom, each is meaningful in itself for each subjective individual exactly because there is no cosmic meaning to justify them. They are meaningful because they are meaningful to a subject, and they must be avoided because they have no cosmic meaning or any meaning outside the subject who is forced to experience them and for no other reason but that that subject was forced to exist. There is no reason for anyone to experience any of it. Each and every one of them is experienced without any valid justification or purpose. But that doesn’t nullify them of meaning, but on the contrary, had there been a cosmic or some other external meaning then many negative experiences could have been canceled out in the light of the cosmic meaning, at least to some degree. But the fact that there isn’t one, makes every experience meaningful in itself. When experiences exist for their own sake, they become more meaningful, not less. Every experience matters, as experiences are all that there is and the only thing that counts ethically. There is nothing but experiences that has any ethical meaning. Therefore every moment in life matters, and that is exactly the opposite of Nihilism. Of course there are many kinds of antinatalists who emphasize all kinds of reasons and reasoning, but in my case and I am under the strong impression that this is also the case of most antinatalists, it is the suffering that motives them. As opposed to the ridiculous Nihilism claim and to how pro-natalists prefer to think of us, most are motivated by caring and mercy for others. Not by hating their own lives, or life in general, but by hating suffering. Most antinatalists are not driven by their supposed depression or by their pure logic calculation, but rather by concern and compassion. And so, more relevantly to our point here, is that antinatalists are highly sensitive to everything that happens and can happen in life. And that perspective makes antinatalists way more ‘sanctifiers’ of life than pro-natalists.

Attributing something with sanctity means treating it with the highest level of carefulness, respect and responsibility. In that sense, preventing life which are expected to be miserable is to sanctify it much more than not stopping them, let alone using the excuse of protecting the notion of the sanctity of life despite that notion doesn’t have experiences and can’t be harmed by anything, as opposed to actual living creatures who would be forced to experience extreme misery. Sacrificing people in the name of the insentient idea of the ‘sanctity of life’ is not sanctity, it is cruelty.

One of the most dangerous practical implications of the ‘Sanctity of Life’ notion is the opposition to genetic testing.

With techniques such as genetic screening, chorionic villus sampling, amniocentesis, ultrasonography and karyotype analysis, expectant parents come to learn in advance if their conceived child will be born with a congenital disease, deformity and/or disability. Hence, for example, parents-to-be will know beforehand if they are at risk to transmit sickle cell anaemia, and embryos can be detected in utero for Duchene’s muscular dystrophy, Down’s Syndrome or Tay Sachs disease.
Many people oppose genetic testing such as these, which can detect whether there are any inherited disorders, and moreover can predict if any diseases will develop in the future, because that might cause people to decide to terminate the pregnancy.

As antinatalists obviously we think that no person should be created regardless of any congenital impairments, however, it is still better that people who are created would at least have the least congenital impairments possible. One of the most common and strongest antinatalist arguments is that nothing can ever guarantee that someone’s life won’t be miserable, however, genetic tests can at last provide a better starting point by pre-detecting some possible severe congenital impairments. Yet many oppose even that. Even merely providing people with the option of preventing horrible starting points for their children is being opposed.

These claims explicitly say that the less people know the better. These people are afraid that the more expectant parents would know about the expected future of their children the more likely they are to avoid creating it. And what makes it even crazier is that it is not that the people who would choose to terminate the conception in cases of severe congenital impairments would choose not to create a new person at all, I wish that was the case, but unfortunately it is much more probable that these people would terminate that specific conception and try to have another one soon after. These genetic tests are not expected to cause people to create less people, but less severe congenital impairments, and even that is being opposed.

That is, I think, one of the most important conclusions antinatalists should make of the discussion regarding ‘wrongful life’ cases, that there is not even agreement about pre-genetic testing. This is of course extremely disturbing in itself but also particularly for us antinatalists since it indicates how unbridgeable the gap between us and huge parts of the public is.

It is easy to dismiss the notion of the ‘culture of life’ for that matter as being ancient, outdated and anti-scientific, but for example there are about 1.2 billion Catholics, and the Catholic Church preaches that actions such as abortion go against the sanctity of human life and thus the Church disapproves tests such as pre-natal and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis since these tests involve the rejection of several embryos and in certain cases even abortion. Other religions don’t fare much better for that matter.
So this is another issue among many others, that antinatalists must deal with all the time.

Again, I highly oppose the rhetoric of ‘the sanctity of life’, but if anything, it is pre-genetic testing that treats life with sanctity as it expresses respect to the vulnerability, singularity and significance of each individual way more than not even bothering to pre-examine the chances of condemning the to be born with severe congenital impairments. If anything, it is the more tests the higher the value attributed to life and not the other way around. Not to perform every possible test before creating a life is to disrespect it. It is to disrespect the created person, its parents, and society.

Some of its opposers argue that genetic testing might lead to Eugenics.
But obviously there is a huge gap between choosing desirable characteristics and avoiding severe congenital impairments. The genetic testing don’t scan for traits in general and offer people to pick out from an available selection, they scan for potential defects. The issue is not creating children with supposedly better traits but not creating children with surely worse ones. It is not about avoiding traits which are considered as being socially disadvantageous, but about avoiding diseases and traits which are absolutely physically and mentally disadvantageous.
It is a flawed and manipulative comparison aiming at scaring people of designer babies.

We are not even talking here about John Harris and Julian Savulescu’s Principle of Procreative Beneficence (PPB) which claims that couples who decide to create a person have a significant moral obligation to select the child who, given his or her genetic endowment, can be expected to enjoy the most well-being. The issue here is about people having a moral obligation not to create a person who can be expected to endure what is referred to as a wrongful-life.

Some even go the distance and almost say that suffering is desirable. For example in his book The Worth of a Child, Thomas Murray writes:

“The quest for perfection has been spurred by a desire to escape the limitations and especially the hurts that mark indelibly our existence as finite, embodied, independent beings. The danger in that quest is that we can become so attracted to some superhuman idea or entity that we lose sight of, or even come to have contempt for, the actual flawed and vulnerable human beings with whom we live.” (p. 136)

But preventing suffering should be an aspiration not a danger. Only because it is so obvious that life is full of pain and suffering can it be presented in such a nonchalant, if not favorable manner. Why not prevent as much suffering as possible when we can? What is so good about suffering? If it is because it is very humanlike, so are wars, should we not do everything possible to prevent them? Why perpetuate, let alone almost glorify, impairments? all the more so ones that can easily be avoided?

The fact that there are no perfect babies is not a justification to create ones with severe congenital impairments. In fact it is a justification not to create ones at all. That is because the standard for forcing something on someone should be that there would be no harms at all, in other words that it would be perfect. And perfection is not even theoretically a remotely possible option.

If there is a firm opposition not to eugenics but to genetic testing, despite that it doesn’t aim at prioritizing traits which people find desirable, but at preventing diseases and other congenital horrible conditions that no one finds desirable, then what are the odds of convincing every person that every creation of a new person is wrong?

While we don’t need genetic testing to realize that all life is wrong and that we must avoid all of it, there are many people who think that there is no need for genetic testing because all life is a sacred gift of infinite value so no one must ever avoid any of it. Not even when the children and parents wish that they could, a scenario that causes the life “sanctifiers” not only to find genetic testing unneeded but also very problematic, as according to them no one should have the chance of ending no life.
That’s how deep the gap is. And that’s why we shouldn’t keep trying to fill it but to somehow work around it.

References

Begeal, Brady “Burdened by Life: A Brief Comment on Wrongful Birth and Wrongful Life.” Albany Gov’t Law Review Fireplace Blog. 2011. Accessed Jun 1, 2012. http://aglr.wordpress.com/2011/03/28/burdened-by-life-a-brief-comment-on-wrongfulbirth-and-wrongful-life

Benatar D (2006) Better never to have been: the harm of coming into existence. Clarendon, Oxford

Botkin Jeffrey R., “Ethical Issues and Practical Problems in Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis,” Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 26, no. 1 (1998): 17-28.

Ettorre Elizabeth, “Reproductive Genetics, Gender and the Body: ‘Please Doctor, may I have a Normal Baby?’,” Sociology 34 no. 3 (2000): 403-420.

Gardner, M. (2016). Beneficence and procreation. Philosophical Studies; 173(2) 321-336

Giesen Ivo, “Of wrongful birth, wrongful life, comparative law and the politics of tort law systems,” Journal of Contemporary Roman-Dutch Law 72 (2009): 257-273.

Harris John, “The Wrong of Wrongful Life,” Journal of Law and Society 17, no. 1 (1990): 90.

Hensel Wendy F., “The Disabling Impact of Wrongful Birth and Wrongful Life Actions,” Harvard Civil RightsCivil Liberties Law Review 40 (2005): 141-195.

Jennifer Ann Rinaldi, “Wrongful Life and Wrongful Birth: The Devaluation of Life With Disability,” Journal of Public Policy, Administration and Law, 1 (2009): 1-7; Liu, “Wrongful life: some of the problems.”

Kumar R (2015) Risking and wronging. Philos Public Aff 43(1):27–51

Liu, Athena N. C. “Wrongful life: some of the problems.” Journal of Medical Ethics 13 (1987): 69-73.

Loth Marc A., Courts in quest for legitimacy; the case of wrongful life (Rotterdam: Erasmus University, 2007).

Mackenzie Robin. From Sanctity To Screening: Genetic Disabilities, Risk And Rhetorical Strategies In Wrongful Birth And Wrongful Conception Cases Feminist Legal Studies 7: 175–191, 1999

Morreim E. Haavi, “The Concept of Harm Reconceived: A Different Look at Wrongful Life,” Law and Philosophy 7, no. 1 (1988): 3-33.

Morris Anne and Saintier Severine, “To Be or Not to Be: Is That The Question? Wrongful Life and Misconceptions,” Medical Law Review 11 (2003): 167-193.

Murtaugh Michael T., “Wrongful Birth: The Courts’ Dilemma in Determining a Remedy for a Blessed Event,” Pace Law Review 27, no. 2 (2007): 243

Parfit, Derek. Reasons and Persons. (Oxford University Press 1986)

Ramos-Ascensão José, “Welcoming the more vulnerable: do parents have a right to selection of a healthy child?” Europeinfos – Christians perspectives on the EU, 2012: 5, accessed Aug 4, 2013, http://www.comece.eu/europeinfos/en/archive/issue153/article/5140.html

Robertson John A., “Extending preimplantation genetic diagnosis: the ethical debate – Ethical issues in new uses of preimplantation genetic diagnosis,” Human Reproduction 18, no. 3 (2003): 465-471

Sàndor Judit, “From Assisted to Selective Reproduction: Through the Lens of the Court,” The Faculty of Law – Norway, 2013: 14, accessed Jan 14, 2014, http://www.jus.uio.no/english/research/news-andevents/events/conferences/2014/wccl-cmdc/wccl/papers/ws7/w7-sandor.pdf

Savulescu J. Procreative Beneficence: why we should select the best children. Bioethics 200115413–426

Seana Valentine Shiffrin. Harm And Its Moral Significance. Legal Theory, Available on CJO 2012 doi:10.1017/S1352325212000080

Sheldon Sally and Wilkinson Stephen. Termination of Pregnancy for reason of foetal disability: Are there grounds for a special exception in Law? Medical Law Review, 9 (2) pp 85-109

Steinbock, Bonnie, Life Before Birth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)

Steinbock Bonnie & McClamrock Bonnie When is Birth Unfair to the Child? University at Albany, SUNY January 1994

Steininger Barbara C., “Wrongful Birth and Wrongful Life: Basic Questions,” Journal of European Tort Law 2 (2010): 125-155

Stretton, Dean. “The Birth Torts: Damages for Wrongful Birth and Wrongful Life.” Deakin Law Review 10, no. 1 (2005): 319-364

Vesta T. Silva (2011) Lost Choices and Eugenic Dreams: Wrongful Birth Lawsuits in Popular News Narratives, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 8:1, 22-40, DOI: 10.1080/14791420.2010.543985

Webber Jay, “Better Off Dead?” First Things, (2002): 10

Weinberg, Rivka. Existence: who needs it? The non-identity problem and merely possible people
2012 Bioethics ISSN 0269-9702

The former text addresses one of the most common arguments against ‘Wrongful Life’ claims.
If you haven’t read it yet, it is recommended (though not necessary) to do so before reading this one. This text addresses another common argument against ‘Wrongful Life’ claims, that is that they disvalue the life of people with disabilities.

Just a quick reminder, a ‘Wrongful Life’ case is when a child sues for medical negligence a doctor or hospital for failing to diagnose and/or for not informing the child’s parents about a genetic disorder or foetal impairment when abortion was still an option and would have been chosen by the parents had they been informed. The claim in a wrongful-life suit is not that the negligence of the doctor was the cause of the impairment, but that by failing to inform the parents, the doctor is responsible for the birth of an impaired child who otherwise would not have been born and therefore would not have experienced the suffering caused by the impairment. The lawsuit is in respect of the damage caused by the impairment, this would generally include pain, suffering, and ‘disability costs’—the extra financial costs attributable to the disability, such as the cost of nursing care.

One of the main and most important arguments against ‘Wrongful Life’ claims is that they disvalue the life of people with disabilities (which their main problem is not the disability but the inaccessibility, meaning their disability is socially constructed according to the claimers), and that it promotes ableism. However, there is no logical reason for ‘Wrongful Life’ claims to promote ableism. There is no causal link between discriminatively denying people with disabilities from any social benefit and thinking that disabilities should be prevented before people who are forced to endure them are created. And the logic behind this argument is that people prefer to be healthy and not to endure disabilities, a claim which doesn’t by any means imply that once people with disabilities are created they should be discriminated against. If anything, it is the other way around, as this stand expresses a very high sensitivity to the plight of living with disabilities, and therefore asserts that it must be prevented beforehand, it doesn’t imply that it should be discriminated against or ignored once it did occur.

There is no contradiction between thinking that it is better that people with severe disabilities will not be created and that once people with severe disabilities are created they must be treated equally to any other person. There is no reason to infer one assertion from the other. As an antinatalist obviously I am against the creation of any person, however I am in favor of providing each person with the best possible life once created. To treat people with disabilities differently is to victimize them twice. Not only had they been forced to endure severe disabilities, they are also forced to endure discrimination?!

It is totally plausible to think that we must do everything we can to avoid something before it happens and at the same time think that once it did happen, we must do everything we can to make it better. In fact, the main reason most of the people who think that the specific situation in the center of this text must be avoided is that the people forced into it are highly vulnerable. And there is no logic in ignoring their vulnerability and need of assistance once they are created, since the whole point is to prevent harms. Denying them assistance by promoting ableism is to increase harm. There is perfect sense in my view that antinatalists, despite thinking that all procreation regardless of any disability is wrong, would think and promote accessibility for all disabilities. And that is because both positions are about minimizing the harms bound with existence. The best thing is to prevent them of course, but to minimize them surly is better than to ignore them.

Obviously discrimination against persons with disabilities is always wrong, but associating disability with harm and rendering disability a problem, isn’t. It is not that disabilities shouldn’t be associated with harm and rendered a problem, but that they are harms and a problem, and one that at least in ‘Wrongful Life’ cases could have been easily avoided, and avoiding it is desirable when possible.

If there is a situation that no one would have freely chosen, then it means that it is undesirable. If no one would have chosen a disability over not having one, then it means that a disability is not preferable, but something that people need to learn to live with. Disabilities might be cope-able but they are not desirable. People are forced to cope with them, and they wouldn’t have, had they never existed. That is the claim, not that every existing person with disabilities must stop exiting.
No one is claiming that people with disabilities shouldn’t be assisted once they exist, but that it is better to avoid problems instead of struggling with them when there is no harm in that avoidance. And no one is harmed by a life that no one had lived.

Being forced to live with disabilities is an undesired situation which can be very painful, limiting and frustrating, how is that not a harm? And actually, once disabilities are associated with harm, it’s much more reasonable to enhance accessibility, not to promote ableism. It makes more sense that if there is no harm or a problem with disabilities then the world shouldn’t be made more accessible. It must be made more accessible, exactly because disabilities are a problem.

Obviously there is a lot of truth in the claim that the problem is social, economic, physical, and of attitudinal barriers. However, even if the whole world would become highly accessible, it won’t solve many of the structural problems of people with severe disabilities. No elevator, ramp or accessible pedestrian signals can solve chronic pain and all pendency.

Some of the opposers to ‘Wrongful Life’ suites do accept that some cases of people with disabilities can be considered as ‘Wrongful Life’, however, they refuse to argue on their behalf and remain opposers of all cases, so not to run the risk of drawing lines in the sand regarding the status of the various disabilities. But by refusing to explicitly accept at least some cases of disability so there would be no precedent, these people are sacrificing some of the most miserable people in the world. To not offend people with disabilities (an offense that shouldn’t be taken as it is not really an offense in the first place), some people insist that even in cases of medical negligence in which had the parents been informed about the expected impairment they would have chosen to have an abortion, no one should be compensated.

It is very frustrating, cruel, and highly alarming in relation to antinatalism, that humanity is still not almost unanimous regarding conditions such as TaySachs disease, spina bifida, cystic fibrosis, sickle cell disease, hemophilia, Down’s syndrome, muscular dystrophy, severe mental retardation, severe neurological diseases, severe paralyzation, and many other conditions which breaking barriers could never save.

I agree that once people with disabilities exist, making their lives as tolerable as possible despite their disabilities is necessary, but that doesn’t mean that living with disabilities is necessary.
And it is definitely not necessary or justified to keep creating people with disabilities claiming that the problem is not with them but with the world. If the world is wrong, it is wrong to force someone into it. And that goes for all people, because the world is not only wrong for people with disabilities, but for all of them.
If anything, ‘the problem is the world’ argument should cause people to try and fix it first and only afterwards add more people into it. How can a fucked up world serve as a justification for status quo?!

There are numerous problems that need fixing before breeding, any breeding, not only of those expected to be forced with ‘wrongful lives’. For example, curing every known disease, certainly the hard ones, preventing all the pains, all the wars, all the rapes, all the accidents, all racism, all misogyny, all humiliations, all frustrations, all the boredom, all the loneliness, all the despair, all the deaths and etc.
Another problem that must be fixed beforehand is the pointlessness. What exactly is the purpose of life? What would parents answer to their child if they are asked that question? How are they supposed to answer a child who understands that life is purposeless? These cases are still rare but they are more frequent nowadays. More and more people understand that life has no cosmic meaning or purpose and that they must invent one for themselves. But doesn’t it make more sense to figure out the purpose of an action before performing it? Let alone for someone else?! Isn’t it extremely unfair to throw people into a purposeless life for them to figure it out?

According to the logic of the claim that the problem is with the world and that is where ‘wrongful life’ cases should aim their blame, given that death is a problem for most of the living, shouldn’t this unsolvable problem be solved before creating more life?

Separation anxiety is a very serious problem that is rarely treated proportionally only because it is so common and almost unavoidable, let alone in the western world. So doesn’t it make more sense to solve the problem of maternity leave before deciding to force separation anxiety on another person? As, if children start suing their parents for the harm of separation anxiety, the opposers to ‘wrongful life’ cases are supposed to argue that the problem is social and that society must be altered in a way that at least one parent, would be with the child all the time, at least until the age of three. Obviously that is practically delusional.
The logic behind the claim that all the problems are social is that everything must change, except people’s desire to procreate of course. That is despite that even the things that are changeable are not very likely to change, and many are not changeable. Pain, frustration, regret, boredom, weariness, worthlessness, disappointment, death and etc., are unavoidable problems of life. They also must be solved before creating more of it, only that they are unsolvable.

Everyone is either born with disabilities (physical, social, mental or emotional) or would personally experience them at least to some extent later in life, therefore everyone is harmed by being created. People who are born with severe disabilities are, at least statistically, in a worse and more vulnerable position. Life of misery in their case is much more probable. But life of misery is always probable, regardless of severe congenital impairments. So the argument against procreation is stronger in their case for that matter, but it ain’t fundamentally different.

And the argument against procreation is not only about the probability of misery for the person created, but also, and in my view mostly, about the certainty of misery for the ones whom the created person would harm during its life. Every created person is not only in risk of being miserable but is first and foremost in certitude of making others miserable. Every created person is responsible for the creation of many wrongful lives and therefore every life is wrong.

For us antinatalists, this argument is supposedly marginal as we don’t exclude ‘wrongful life’ cases from others. However, it shouldn’t be marginal, as it is a very strong indication of how far we are from the general public who don’t yet agree to prevent even cases of people with severe impairments who claim that their own lives are wrongful. So clearly, there is no chance that the general public would ever be convinced about all of them.

References

Begeal, Brady “Burdened by Life: A Brief Comment on Wrongful Birth and Wrongful Life.” Albany Gov’t Law Review Fireplace Blog. 2011. Accessed Jun 1, 2012. http://aglr.wordpress.com/2011/03/28/burdened-by-life-a-brief-comment-on-wrongfulbirth-and-wrongful-life

Benatar D (2006) Better never to have been: the harm of coming into existence. Clarendon, Oxford

Botkin Jeffrey R., “Ethical Issues and Practical Problems in Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis,” Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 26, no. 1 (1998): 17-28.

Ettorre Elizabeth, “Reproductive Genetics, Gender and the Body: ‘Please Doctor, may I have a Normal Baby?’,” Sociology 34 no. 3 (2000): 403-420.

Gardner, M. (2016). Beneficence and procreation. Philosophical Studies; 173(2) 321-336

Giesen Ivo, “Of wrongful birth, wrongful life, comparative law and the politics of tort law systems,” Journal of Contemporary Roman-Dutch Law 72 (2009): 257-273.

Harris John, “The Wrong of Wrongful Life,” Journal of Law and Society 17, no. 1 (1990): 90.

Hensel Wendy F., “The Disabling Impact of Wrongful Birth and Wrongful Life Actions,” Harvard Civil RightsCivil Liberties Law Review 40 (2005): 141-195.

Jennifer Ann Rinaldi, “Wrongful Life and Wrongful Birth: The Devaluation of Life With Disability,” Journal of Public Policy, Administration and Law, 1 (2009): 1-7; Liu, “Wrongful life: some of the problems.”

Kumar R (2015) Risking and wronging. Philos Public Aff 43(1):27–51

Liu, Athena N. C. “Wrongful life: some of the problems.” Journal of Medical Ethics 13 (1987): 69-73.

Loth Marc A., Courts in quest for legitimacy; the case of wrongful life (Rotterdam: Erasmus University, 2007).

Mackenzie Robin. From Sanctity To Screening: Genetic Disabilities, Risk And Rhetorical Strategies In Wrongful Birth And Wrongful Conception Cases Feminist Legal Studies 7: 175–191, 1999

Morreim E. Haavi, “The Concept of Harm Reconceived: A Different Look at Wrongful Life,” Law and Philosophy 7, no. 1 (1988): 3-33.

Morris Anne and Saintier Severine, “To Be or Not to Be: Is That The Question? Wrongful Life and Misconceptions,” Medical Law Review 11 (2003): 167-193.

Murtaugh Michael T., “Wrongful Birth: The Courts’ Dilemma in Determining a Remedy for a Blessed Event,” Pace Law Review 27, no. 2 (2007): 243

Parfit, Derek. Reasons and Persons. (Oxford University Press 1986)

Ramos-Ascensão José, “Welcoming the more vulnerable: do parents have a right to selection of a healthy child?” Europeinfos – Christians perspectives on the EU, 2012: 5, accessed Aug 4, 2013, http://www.comece.eu/europeinfos/en/archive/issue153/article/5140.html

Robertson John A., “Extending preimplantation genetic diagnosis: the ethical debate – Ethical issues in new uses of preimplantation genetic diagnosis,” Human Reproduction 18, no. 3 (2003): 465-471

Sàndor Judit, “From Assisted to Selective Reproduction: Through the Lens of the Court,” The Faculty of Law – Norway, 2013: 14, accessed Jan 14, 2014, http://www.jus.uio.no/english/research/news-andevents/events/conferences/2014/wccl-cmdc/wccl/papers/ws7/w7-sandor.pdf

Savulescu J. Procreative Beneficence: why we should select the best children. Bioethics 200115413–426

Seana Valentine Shiffrin. Harm And Its Moral Significance. Legal Theory, Available on CJO 2012 doi:10.1017/S1352325212000080

Shakespeare, T. and Hull R. Termination of Pregnancy After Non-Invasive Prenatal Testing (NIPT): Ethical Considerations  Journal of Practical Ethics Volume 6, Issue 2 2018

Sheldon Sally and Wilkinson Stephen. Termination of Pregnancy for reason of foetal disability: Are there grounds for a special exception in Law? Medical Law Review, 9 (2) pp 85-109

Steinbock, Bonnie, Life Before Birth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)

Steinbock Bonnie & McClamrock Bonnie When is Birth Unfair to the Child? University at Albany, SUNY January 1994

Steininger Barbara C., “Wrongful Birth and Wrongful Life: Basic Questions,” Journal of European Tort Law 2 (2010): 125-155

Stretton, Dean. “The Birth Torts: Damages for Wrongful Birth and Wrongful Life.” Deakin Law Review 10, no. 1 (2005): 319-364

Vesta T. Silva (2011) Lost Choices and Eugenic Dreams: Wrongful Birth Lawsuits in Popular News Narratives, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 8:1, 22-40, DOI: 10.1080/14791420.2010.543985

Webber Jay, “Better Off Dead?” First Things, (2002): 10

The last three texts (1,2,3) addressed a famous ethical paradox regarding harming future individuals called the Non-Identity Problem. Basically, the argument is that despite the intuition that it is wrong, or at least harmful, to create a person in the case of foreseen severe impairments, as long as that person is having a life considered to be worth living overall, that person couldn’t be regarded as a victim of the severe impairments, or to even be harmed by them, since without them, that person wouldn’t exist at all and so wouldn’t have this considered to be an overall worth living life.

The Non-Identity Problem feeds many pro-natalitsts who are asking, how can the act of creating someone be wrong if it is not bad for anyone specific? And in those three texts I’m trying to answer this question.

However, unfortunately, the fact is that meanwhile in the real world, while ethicists deal with theoretical moral dilemmas, many people are still far from considering as ‘wrong’ and as ‘a harm’, not cases of foreseen severe impairments endured by people who have a life worth living overall, but cases of severe impairments resulted from medical negligence or recklessness and endured by people who have a life not worth living according to the very people who are forced to live it, or according to their parents who plea on their behalf.
These cases are referred to as ‘Wrongful Life’ and they are supposed to be much easier and way more obvious than the cases the Non-Identity Problem refers to, yet amazingly they aren’t.

The following text, as well as the next three texts, addresses the case of how humanity regards the case of ‘Wrongful Life’. Or in other words, how human society view cases of people who view their own lives or of parents who view their children’s lives, as wrongful and would rather that they never have existed.

A ‘Wrongful Life’ case is when a child sues for medical negligence a doctor or hospital for failing to diagnose and/or for not informing the child’s parents about a genetic disorder or foetal impairment when abortion was still an option and would have been chosen by the parents had they been informed. The claim in a wrongful-life suit is not that the negligence of the doctor was the cause of the impairment, but that by failing to inform the parents, the doctor is responsible for the birth of an impaired child who otherwise would not have been born and therefore would not have experienced the suffering caused by the impairment. The lawsuit is in respect of the damage caused by the impairment, this would generally include pain, suffering, and ‘disability costs’—the extra financial costs attributable to the disability, such as the cost of nursing care.

The main arguments made by law jurisdictions, politicians and the general public against ‘Wrongful Life’ claims are:
The child suffers no damage due to the negligence, because without the negligence the child would not even exist
That ‘Wrongful Life’ claims disvalue the life of people with disabilities
That ‘Wrongful Life’ claims would put pressure on doctors to advise people to have abortions
That ‘Wrongful Life’ claims would lead to Eugenics
That ‘Wrongful Life’ claims go against the ‘Sanctity Of Life’

The following text addresses the first argument and the next parts would address the rest.

The Non-Existence of an Argument

Most courts don’t accept cases of ‘wrongful life’ mostly by claiming that damages are incalculable in monetary terms because it is impossible to compare life in an impaired state versus non-existence. For someone to claim compensation for being created in an impaired state, that person needs to show the court that s/he had been better off not being created. But non-existence is not a relevant comparative state, therefore it can’t be better off.
This claim can be referred to as the Non-Existence Argument.

Another common claim made by courts regarding ‘wrongful life’ cases is “the very nearly uniform high value which the law and mankind has placed on human life, rather than its absence.” (Becker v. Schwartz, 386 N.E 2d 807, 812 1978) Or in other words, the courts treat life as a blessing, stating that: “Life – whether experienced with or without a major physical handicap – is more precious than non-life”. (Berman v. Allen, 404 A.2d 8 N.J 1979)

Non-existence is indeed not a relevant comparative state, however, this statement must go both ways. The courts can’t argue for key flaws in the wrongful life argument such as that it is incoherent for someone to claim that s/he would rather not to exist because non-existence is not a state anyone can be in, but in the same breath argue that life is a blessing, because if non-existence is not a state anyone can be in, how can existence be a blessing? Compared with what? What else is there other than existence? If non-existence is not a relevant comparative state and therefore non-existence can’t be better off than existence, than it is also the case that existence can’t be better off than non-existence. What is supposed to be derived from this common courts’ statement is that non-existence and existence can’t be compared at all, therefore non-existence can’t be better off and existence in itself can’t be a blessing as again, compared with what other option?

If impaired existence is not a harm because it can’t be worse than non-existence which is not a state that can be attributed to someone, then any existence is not a blessing or a benefit because it can’t be better than non-existence which as aforesaid is not a state that can be attributed to someone.
If existence is a blessing it must be in comparison to non-existence and if so then why can’t a person claim that its existence is worse off than non-existence? If the courts can say that existence is better compared with non-existence, than others can say the opposite.

I think that both claims can’t be made for the simple reason that indeed non-existence is not a comparative state. Nevertheless wrongful life claims are not flawed, as a person can certainly claim that its life is not worth living even if the alternative is not having a life at all. The claim is not that there is a better option that the plaintiff prefers, but that the option that was forced on that person is harmful, and since it is a result of negligence, compensation is required. The person claims that its life is miserable and that had s/he had an option this life would have never been chosen. These people were harmed by their existence because they have one, not because before that they didn’t have one. They don’t necessarily prefer another option but not to be forced with the one that was forced on them, or specifically in the case of a lawsuit, to at least be compensated for it. The claim for compensation is not for a better life that were deprived of someone, but for the particularly miserable life that were forced on someone. It is not that they prefer to have their former state which is non-existence, but to have no state at all. They don’t say YES to non-existence, but NO to their existence.
But when it comes to most courts it is as if these people do say YES to non-existence, and as if there is such a state as non-existence since they are saying to these people; what is preferable to your life, non-existence?!

Since non-existence is not really an option for anybody, and existence is the only possible option for everybody, but it is not necessary or in the interest of anyone, there is no sense in considering procreation as a benevolent state. Procreation is unnecessarily creating an unnecessary and vulnerable person, that would necessarily experience unnecessary harms.

Besides, an action can be harmful and wrong even if it brings about a better situation overall to the person who was harmed.
Intelligence and physical beauty for example are quite consensually considered to have a very high value. Would it be morally justified for a doctor to anaesthetize a person without consent and perform some plastic surgeries and add some IQ points to its brain to benefit that person? Would the same courts who declined wrongful life cases claiming that life is always a benefit, also decline a suit by that person? Highly unlikely. They would probably convict the doctor for harming that person despite that s/he is not worse off, but probably the other way around. That is because it may be permissible for a person to agree to undergo a harm to receive a benefit, but it is definitely not permissible for another person to impose the harm without consent. Had the doctor performed the operation without consent but so to prevent the operated person from suffering a greater harm, even if as a result of the operation the operated person have been harmed or is suffering from pain or physical disability which was inevitable as part of the rescuing procedure, it is extremely unlikely that any court would find that doctor guilty of harm. And that is because when harms are caused to prevent greater harms they are morally permissible, but they are never permissible to bestow benefits.

And obviously, the case of creating a person is utterly different than the case of an existing person. As opposed to bestowing benefits to an existing person which can be better off by the operation (regardless of if the operation should be considered as morally permissible or not), a created person is not better off by its creation, nor the other way around. A created person is not better nor worse off, but rather s/he literally wasn’t and now s/he is. So if courts would rule against harming an existing person to bestow benefits despite that person being better off, they should most definitely rule against harming a person by forcing him/her to exist when that person is not by any means better off.

Even if the creation of the people in ‘wrongful life’ cases was truly a benefit overall, no one would be harmed or be deprived of that alleged overall benefit if they hadn’t been created. However, they are severely harmed by being forced to exist.
Procreation is creating a vulnerable person who can be miserable, and in the case of a foreseen impaired life it is creating an even more vulnerable person than usual, and who is more likely to be miserable once forced into existence.
While there is something awfully wrong about creating a person with impairments, there is nothing wrong with not creating a person at all, let alone not creating one with severe impairments.

Comparing the two scenarios, in one there would be a suffering person, suffering parents, and more burdens on society, and in the other there would be no one who is deprived of a life s/he never had, the parents won’t be harmed by an impaired life of a child they never had, and society won’t be harmed by the creation of another person who needs much more attention and resources than average. This is not supposed be to such a tough moral dilemma.

Even if damages are incalculable in monetary terms because it is impossible to compare life in an impaired state and nonexistence, they are calculable in monetary terms when compared to life not in an impaired state. Why can’t courts compare the costs and burdens of life in an impaired state versus life not in an impaired state and compensate the family for whatever the gap they would find for every specific case relative to people of more or less the same social state? Why not define harm in relation to wrongful life cases as putting someone in a worse off place than what is considered normal? Or putting someone in a severely inferior state compared to the average starting point and welfare? Or define a decent minimum standard for existence, some basic living conditions, and whom whose life is below that threshold is a ‘wrongful life’ case. Obviously, as an antinatalist I don’t think that these options are sufficient or needed, I am only specifying them to show that the point of reference to calculate compensation need not to be non-existence, and that given that it is possible (and quite easy) to find calculable measures in monetary terms for damages, this is not really a serious judiciary problem, but rather a serious ethical failure.

I think that courts can easily avoid philosophical discourses over the metaphysics of non-existence by comparing harms in ‘wrongful life’ cases with other created people, or by referring to the parents’ right to decide, or to “the fundamental right of a child to be born as a whole, functioning human being”, or anything of this sort. But we are still extremely far from any kind of resolution even in cases such as these. We are living in a world in which fetuses are more important than people. You are very much familiar with this from debates over abortions, but here it is not even the case of women’s rights over their own bodies against the so called rights of fetuses, but of children’s rights not to be forced into an impaired existence against the so called rights of fetuses which are actually the very same children before they are born! This is a new level of madness and it is even scarier than the usual scary arguments against abortions.

As opposed to the claims against wrongful life cases, these people are severely harmed by their existence as they are forced to endure numerous severe negative experiences, probably on a daily basis, with no necessary reason, without consent, and with a very high probability of being extremely miserable for their entire life.
But creating a person is always imposing pain, frustration, death, the fear of death, illnesses, boredom, anger, anxiety, regret, disappointment, suffering and etc., on that person. That is sufficient for claiming that regardless of any severe impairments, procreation always harms the person created. That is sufficient to claim that actually, every child has been harmed.

Cases of severe congenital impairments might be viewed as more complicated when it is of whom who view their lives as worth living (which is the heart of the Non-Identity Problem), but in the case of people who view their lives as not worth living, and to such extent that they have decided to sue, meaning to endure the awful experience of a trial, in cases of people who are stating that they rather not to have existed, people who are stating that their existence is so bad that they would rather not to have experienced it, who are saying not only that they are harmed during their existence, but that they are harmed by their existence, where is the dilemma? They need not to argue that non-existence is a better option for them but that existence is harm to them. It is impossible to avoid this by claiming that non-existence is not a state anyone can be in as the claim is not why haven’t you left me in non-existence a state which I would have preferred over my horrible existence, but that you have harmed me by not preventing my horrible existence. The claim is of harming by not preventing harm.

If more or less the same harms would have been caused to an existing person, say when that person is one month old, and it was caused by a negligent doctor who failed to notice a developing disease or a medical condition that is not congenital, probably all courts would decide to compensate the harmed person. But that is not the case when the negligence occurs before a person was created. Despite that the harms in terms of pain, suffering and costs being more or less the same, in the one month old case compensation is unquestionable and in the not yet existing person case being dismissed is very probable. The reasoning behind this gap is that had not for the negligence in the one month old case the person would have “normal” life and in the case of the not yet existing person, s/he wouldn’t have a life at all. In other words the courts view life as a gift irrespective of their quality. Experiencing chronic pain, suffering, disability, paralysis, and what not, as a result of negligence is a very serious crime only when it happens in life and never when it is instead of life. When this is the inevitable price of life, life is still viewed as a blessing. That is even when the ones forced to experience all that feel differently.

This represents a new category of pro-natalism since here it is doctors and later the law system that forces existence, not to mention an impaired one, on people without their consent, and without their parents’ consent, and as opposed to the cases referred to by the Non-Identity Problem, without them being considered worth living by whom who were forced to endure them, or by their parents.
This is how far behind pro-natalists are. Not even ‘wrongful life’ cases are viewed as wrong. So how likely is it that they would view all of them as wrong?

References

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2012 Bioethics ISSN 0269-9702

One last quick comment regarding the Non-Identity Problem.
Probably the most familiar and common example being used to explain the platform which the non-identity problem emerges from, is Parfit’s case of a fourteen-year-old girl who decides to create a person, an example I have specified in the second part. But there is another common example, one from the environmental domain, which I find important to shortly address.

The common intuition is that polluting the environment and lavishly consuming “natural resources” is harmful towards future people. But according to the logical inferences derived from the non-identity problem, since the people who would be harmed in the future by existing people polluting and wasting the environment in the present, wouldn’t exist if present people decide to stop polluting the environment and lavishly consume “natural resources” (because environmental policies have effects on people’s behaviors, habits, location, workplaces and etc., which would also affect when and with whom they procreate and as a consequence affect the identity of the procreated), as long as the future people in the trashed environment would have a life worth living, supposedly no one is harmed by currently existing people polluting the environment and lavishly consuming “natural resources”.
In other words, the non-identity problem raises the question: considering that different environmental policies affect the identity of future people, as long as the lives of the future people who would exist as a consequence of any level of environmental policy, including the most negligent one, are worth living, who is harmed by environmental negligence? Its logical inference is that none of it is harming anyone. According to the logic of the non-identity problem as long as the environmental policies performed today don’t result in future people having lives not worth living, all environmental policies are unharmful, and not wrong, as who are their victims?

To not repeat the arguments regarding harms and harming (including harming future people in spite of the non-identity problem), which I have broadly discussed in the three previous parts about the non-identity problem, as well as in the text about Seana Shiffrin’s prominent and outstanding article Wrongful Life, Procreative Responsibility, and the Significance of Harm, I’ll just point out that there certainly are identified specific victims of polluting the environment and lavishly consuming “natural resources”, and these are of course each and every currently existing sentient creature on earth. There is everything wrong with environmental negligence, it is extremely harmful, and its victims are trillions of identified specific sentient creatures living in and off the environment. These are the main victims of pollution and “resources” depletion as it is, and if the non-identity problem would be taken seriously in an environmental context (which practically gives permission to pollute even more), it would make their lives even worse. Only an extremely super-speciesist perspective can ignore all the harms done to all these individuals, undoubtedly the vast majority of sentient creatures on earth.

The answer to the question who is harmed by polluting the environment and lavishly consuming “natural resources”, is as always, first and foremost, the most vulnerable and defenseless creatures on the planet. These are the ones who are highly affected by every human action and are constantly harmed by each and every human activity. They are always the most numerous victims, and always the ones who are harmed most severely. Therefore they are the ones who must be in the center of every ethical thought, and yet they are rarely considered at all.
Currently, reasoning, even in the ethical sphere, is so speciesist that a pseudo sophisticated problem such as who is harmed by pollution and resources depletion given that the ones who would exist as a consequence of it would actually benefit from that, can be seriously discussed while totally ignoring the trillions of sentient creatures who as a consequence would be even more severely harmed than they already are.