The leitmotif of antinatalism must be, in my view, the harm to others. As broadly claimed in many former texts, especially in Harm to Others, the worst aspect of procreation is not the harm caused to the created people but the harm caused by the created people. When considering each and every effect a person has on others, then the thousands if not tens of thousands of victims of each created person are the main victims of procreation and therefore must be the main claim against procreation.

Having said that, obviously the fact that the harm to others should be the central ethical reason never to procreate, doesn’t by any means diminish the severity, cruelty, and criminalness of creating people regardless of their harm to others. Evidently, many of the texts in this blog solely focus on the harm to the created people. Furthermore, obviously, the two perspectives are not at all in contradiction or clash, and in fact they may intertwine, and that is the point I wish to make in this text.

Life in this world is inherently violent, forceful, coercive and exploitive. From the moment people are born, they are bound to cause harm to others. Existing without harming others is not an option. Everything that was ever made is at the expense of someone, in some way. In many cases, numerous someones in various ways. Nothing is produced out of nothing, and nothing has no impact at all. Everything people do affects others. And it starts even before people are born as many of the antepartum procedures involve harm to others, exemplified mainly in the production, testing and waste of medical equipment.
But obviously that is only the beginning of a lifelong harmful impact on others that all people necessarily cause. A harmful impact that is caused by everyone, every day, through every action. From the houses they live in, their workplaces, the roads from their houses to their workplaces, the vehicles they are using on these roads, their furniture, their electrical appliances, their use of electricity, their clothes, the soaps they are using to clean their clothes, their toys, their shoes, their cosmetics, their beloved mobile phones, their use of anything made out of steel, copper, mercury, silver, gold, rubber, wood and most definitely plastic, their use of anything that causes some amount of pollution including CO2 (practically everything), and of course every piece of food they consume. That includes plant based food as well since every plant based food item is in one way or another a product of dispossessing, plundering, habitat destructing, poisoning, trampling, starving, dehydrating, air polluting, water polluting, climate alteration, land alteration, water waste, oil drilling, and etc. However, as long as 95% of people consume animal products, procreation is first and foremost a perpetuation of the most extreme torture system ever in history.

When creating people, parents are not only putting their children in harm’s way, they are forcing their children to put other sentient creatures in a highway of harm. They are forcing their children to force others to feel pain, fear, despair, diseases, boredom, loneliness, hunger, thirst, exhaustion, frustration, loss, crowdedness, suffocation, burns, bruises, mutilations, freezing, boiling, enslavement, slaughter and every other horrible thing people are doing to other animals and other people.

Life is necessarily an imposition not only in the sense that each necessarily starts with an imposition, but also because each is necessarily sustained by imposition. So parents are not only imposing existence on their children, they are also imposing on their children further imposition – the imposition on others to be exploited, polluted, and sacrificed for these children’s sustainability in the least worse case, and merely for these children’s trivial pleasures in the worst case.

The parents are, in effect, corrupting their own children. This is unjust toward the children who are imposed to be units of suffering, exploitation and pollution. The fact that there is no alternative to existing while imposing suffering, exploitation and pollution, is not a justification for this imposition, let alone for imposing this imposition.

Most parents are absolutely ignorant of the real scope of the harm their children would cause, but nowadays, many are at least aware of terms such as carbon footprint, ecological burden and overpopulation, and they all know that meat comes from animals who didn’t choose to live in factory farms and didn’t kill themselves. So when they are creating new people they know that not only that their own children would necessarily be harmed, but also that they will necessarily harm others, and so they are imposing their children with being wrongdoers from birth. No one chooses neither to be born, nor to be born a unit of suffering, exploitation and pollution. That is imposed on everyone as part of the imposition of their existence. People don’t become suffering, exploitation and pollution units as a result of their own choices, they are all born ones. Most will later choose to be huge units of suffering, exploitation and pollution instead of the smallest possible, but that’s another argument. The point here is that being a wrongdoer is inevitable and it was imposed on every person created, and that is another reason why no one should ever procreate.

Procreation is creating people who can’t be unharmful even if they wanted to.
Most wouldn’t care about harming others, but the ones who would are imposed to live with constant guilt and shame, with angst and rage, and maybe even depression, despair and self-hatred. It is quite tragic that the more caring and compassionate people are, the greater was the sin of creating them, as they are the ones (compared to other created people of course) who are most affected by the imposition of their imposition.

Some vegans for example are furious with their parents for forcing them to consume animals before they had an option to choose otherwise. It is extremely frustrating for them to realize that others were forced to suffer so extremely for their sake. They were forced to be exploiters of others without their consent, their awareness or any ability to comprehend the kind of torture they were forced to participate in, and up until a certain point with no ability to choose otherwise, or at least reduce their share and act so others would reduce their share in the global hell which is existence.
They are in no way the main victims, the main victims are obviously their victims, but at least to the more caring, compassionate and moral people, the thought that their existence is bound with the harm to others is very harming in itself.

The fact that all people, even the few who really care about others and really don’t want to harm anyone, have no choice but to hurt others, is another reason not to procreate since at least in the case of caring and sensitive people, that is part of their victimization. And that terrible situation can be avoided by avoiding procreation. If no one is created, no one could harm anyone.

But of course it is much more profound than the victimization of people of this kind. The fact that even theoretically it is impossible to fulfil the most basic ethical requirement – do no harm, indicates how structurally and inherently corrupted and unethical existence is.
In another text I argued that it is extremely unfair to force someone into a structurally and inherently unjust world, and here, more or less on the same token, I argue that it is extremely unethical to force someone into a world where that someone cannot be ethical.

Parents are condemning their children to be unethical from the beginning of their existence.

People who are aware of this necessary feature of existence and nevertheless choose to procreate are engaging in evil crimes and are forcing their children to do so as well.

The ethical reaction to this fact must be to refrain from procreation.
Only that people are not ethical creatures, therefore they don’t really care that their children would also be unethical creatures, who in their turn won’t care that their children are unethical creatures and so on and so forth, until someday, someone would somehow find a way to stop this endless circle of misery. Would it be you?