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Many pro-natalists are claiming that there is something oxymoronic and self-defeating about antinatalism. Their claims, can be divided into three sub-claims: antinatalism being theoretically oxymoronic, ethically oxymoronic, and practically oxymoronic.
The theoretically oxymoronic sub-claim is that antinatalism is self-refuting because antinatalists claim they should never have been born, but if so, how could they have made this claim? The claim’s existence is negated by its own existence. One must experience existence to be able to condemn it.
The ethically oxymoronic sub-claim is that antinatalism is self-defeating because if the more caring people would not procreate, and the less caring people would keep procreating, the world would become a worse place, which is exactly the opposite of antinatalists’ goals, as it would be filled with careless people.
The practically oxymoronic sub-claim is that antinatalism is self-defeating because if only antinatalists would not procreate, after one generation, there would no longer be any antinatalists, and everyone would be pro-natalists.

In the following text I’ll shortly address these claims.

Antinatalism Being Theoretically Implausible

The fact that had antinatalists never been born they couldn’t have argued that they should have never been born, is not by any means in contradiction with the fact that after they were born, and experienced existence, they think that no one should be created. Obviously one must experience existence to be able to condemn it, and indeed each and every antinatalist has, and that’s part of the reasons why we wish to prevent it from others. Antinatalism is about preventing the creation of others, not about retroactively preventing the creation of self.

It would have been a contradiction if antinatalists were arguing somehow that they should have never been born, before being born, and chose to be born anyway (sorry but sometimes ridiculous arguments must be refuted by ridiculous means). But obviously no one was a person before being created and no one chose to be created, so there is nothing self-refuting about people being forced to be created, and later, after experiencing existence, condemning it, and arguing that no one should be created.

If this claim was true then it was also implausible to say something like ‘my yellow fever is terrible, I should have never gone on that trip’, because had that person never gone on that trip this claim about the suffering from yellow fever couldn’t have been made. Supposedly, this claim’s existence was also negated by its own existence. But I fail to notice any self-refuting in the claim that I should have never gone on that trip, or should have never experienced something that I prefer to never have experienced, and that is all the more so the case since, as earlier mentioned, antinatalism is about preventing something from others not about retroactively preventing something from self, and so in this relation it would be that others should not go on that trip so to not get yellow fever.

And generally speaking, ethical arguments that deal with ethically unpermissive actions, or with negative rights, don’t necessarily need to be self-sustaining. There is nothing irrational or self-refuting about a philosophy or about ethical claims that their implementation would bring about the situation in which there would be no one there anymore to make them.
It would be irrational and self-refuting only if one of the premises or claims of antinatalism is that antinatalists should exist, but obviously there is nothing of this sort in antinatalism.
True, if everyone would agree with and apply antinatalism there would be no antinatalists anymore but there also won’t be a need for them anymore.
The supposed negation of the argument in case it is implemented is not a problem, and that is because sentient beings are more important than arguments. In fact arguments are important only because and as long as there are sentient beings, and this claim, by implying that antinatalism is self-defeating, suggests otherwise. It won’t matter that there would be no one to claim for antinatalism when there are no sentient creatures anymore. To claim otherwise is to suggest that it is a problem that once the solution is fully implemented there is no problem to solve anymore. But the fact that solutions are only relevant when there are problems is in fact a very basic antinatalist notion. As the famous antinatalist saying goes – there is no need to create a need; and in relation to the theoretically oxymoronic claim I am adding that an option that negates all problems is not a problem, but an absolute solution.

Antinatalism Being Ethically Implausible

There is something ambivalent if not absurd in the claim that antinatalism is self-defeating because if the more caring people would not procreate, and the less caring people would keep procreating, the world would become a worse place. It is as if the claimers are saying: ‘hey antinatalists you are alright! we need more people like you, so why don’t you ditch this whole antinatalist thing and make more of yourselves’, and that is absurd because the reason they want more antinatalist people is exactly the reason that made people antinatalists in the first place – because they care about suffering. The exact reasons that make them think that antinatalists should procreate are the ones who brought antinatalists to conclude that everyone mustn’t procreate.

People who are claiming that it is wrong to forbid procreation for ethical reasons because then only unethical people would procreate, should advocate, if anything, at least for conditional antinatalism, something in the form of ‘people can procreate on the condition that they are ethical’. Are any of these claimers making such a claim? Hardly likely. Instead they are choosing the easier and cowardly road – trying to convince ethical people that they must procreate too.
If the supporters of this claim are so bothered with problems in the world, why not asking careless people to stop procreating, at least correspondingly to asking antinatalists to start?

According to the logic of the supporters of the ethically oxymoronic claim, they should advocate for that only ethical people would procreate, and the rest will not. But this is not their claim. Obviously they are just manipulatively trying to turn antinatalists’ caring against their world view, and so to justify their own world view.

But even if it wasn’t the case, creating more people with the aim of solving the world’s problems, hoping that the created people would be caring, and would be capable enough to solve them, is probably the worst way to try solving them. There is no guarantee that caring people would create caring people. And even caring people are causing a lot of harm just by being alive, even if they really try not to.
Clearly it is much more efficient to focus our energy on convincing other existing people to solve world problems instead of creating more and more people, all the more so when many of which are most likely to be merely additional problems instead of solving existing ones.

But even if they won’t, the best way to create more ethical people is by activism, not by procreation. Ethical people who create new people, except the enormous harm their children would inevitably cause just by being alive, prevent from themselves to invest most of their time, energy and resources in existing problems.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the average cost of raising a child from birth through age 17 is $233,610. And many children are living at their parents’ expense (who often also pay for college education) way past 17.
And it’s not the only huge financial cost which must be considered. If parents devote on average around 3 hours a day to their children, by the time they turn 18, it sums up to about 20,000 hours.
Other crucial considerations are hard to measure. It is hard to tell how much energy raising children costs but it surly is enormous.
If all that time, money and energy is invested in solving existing problems, it would surly have a much more positive effect than raising children.

Not to procreate is to not harm the person created and to not harm others (those who would be harmed by the person created), while procreating is to cause harm to the person created as well as to others. The chances that the child would be such an efficient activist that it would be worth all the harms caused by it and for it, are very very low. It is much more probable that the person created by antinatalists would cause more suffering than it would reduce (not to mention that many children would choose not to be activists at all, and so would only cause suffering and won’t reduce any), and would have more negative experiences than positive ones. Most people, even ones without exceptional problems, are frustrated, bored and dissatisfied most of the time. Most are not satisfied with their jobs, their social life, their intimate relationships, and there is a huge gap between their expectations of themselves and of the world, and what their actual lives are like. Even without exceptional problems and life of misery, it is easy to see that most people are dissatisfied. While all that is the case for every person, since this claim suggests intending children to solve the world’s problems, that means adding an enormous weight for them to carry on their shoulders, as well as exposing them to the horrors of the world. Antinatalists are suffering because of what goes on in the world, why would they want to do that to their children?!

Even if, for the sake of the argument, I will ignore the problems involved in turning children into a means to an end (in this case it is not even using someone for something, it is creating someone for something), there is no guarantee that the assignment of the created children to change the world would ever succeed. The persons created might be totally unfit for being the activists expected of them. And there is not even a guarantee that the person created would even become an activist, not to mention not harm others, and surly not that it would be such an amazing and efficient activist that any harm caused to and by that person would be worth it.
On the other hand if people would devote the same time, energy and resources to turning themselves and other people who already exist, into super-efficient activists, it would be much more sensible, efficient and morally justified than creating new people to solve problems.

Antinatalism Being Practically Implausible

The practically oxymoronic sub-claim is probably the most common one. Being so, it is commonly addressed by antinatalists, so I’ll keep it short.
Basically, antinatalists commonly counter argue this claim, by arguing that antinatalism is not inherited, evidently all antinatalists were born.

The ‘practically implausible’ claimers can counter this counter argument claiming that antinatalists were created in times when it was harder not to procreate. But probably the vast majority of antinatalists are younger than 50 years old, meaning most were created in the 70’s and later, namely, after the social revolutions of the 60’s, and in times where it became socially acceptable to choose not to procreate. It is highly unlikely that so many people who were carriers of the “antinatalism gene” (according to this claim they must be more or less equivalent to the number of current antinatalists) have chosen to nevertheless procreate in times when it was no longer unacceptable not to. I am not at all ignoring the fact that social pressure to procreate was still put on people (as is to this very day, especially on women), rather that it was significantly reduced at some parts of the world, surly to the point that had there truly been some kind of “antinatalism gene” then at least its carriers who lived in these societies, would have forsaken procreation.

Having said that, I think that behavioral and belief systems have a strong genetic component. Certainly not to the degree implied by the above pro-natalists claims, but definitely more than implied by many antinatalists who counter these pro-natalists claims.
It is still hard to determine the nature vs. nurture debate, however, there are plenty of evidences supporting that both play very important roles. And in any case, I don’t know if there is any scientific denial of the crucial impact genetics has in shaping a person’s personality, preferences and positions.

People are born with certain genetic predispositions, and they obtain other dispositions throughout their lives. These significantly affect the positions they may or may not accept during their lives. People are not blank slates and in addition they are not rational creatures. This makes it even harder for ideas, no matter how right and rational, to be accepted by people simply because they are right and rational.

There is no reason to think that an idea would prevail just because it is rational, or right, or just, or ethical. This is not how the world works. It would be a bit exaggerated to claim that the world acts on the basis of might is right, as that is not always the case. But unfortunately it is closer to that than to being rational, right, just, and ethical.

There is nothing rational, right, just, and ethical about creating someone who would be tortured for its entire miserable life, merely to enjoy nibbling that creature’s corpse for a couple of minutes.
There is nothing rational, right, just, and ethical about solving conflicts and disputes by violence not to mention wars.
There is nothing rational, right, just, and ethical about discrimination, no matter on what grounds; be it gender, skin color, sexual orientation, weight, height, or species.
There is nothing rational, right, just, and ethical about the fact that the most crucial decision in anyone’s life – the very fact of being created, where, when, to whom, and with which genetic makeup – isn’t and can’t be made, or even be slightly influenced, by that person.
And yet, all this and a lot more, are so natural and accustomed parts of life on earth.

Ironically, thinking that eventually rationality is destined to succeed, is irrational.
Our world is not rational. It runs by irrational systems, and it is consisted of irrational creatures.

People have innate predispositions.
That doesn’t mean that indeed us antinatalists should procreate so there would be more of us, as evidently the number of antinatalists is growing, and obviously all antinatalists have been created by probably natalist parents, so they were convinced by arguments, or experiences they have gone through. What it does mean is that there would be many people who will never be antinatalists because their innate predispositions, independently of and all the more so in addition to the pro-natalist indoctrination they have been brain washed with their entire lives, would overcome rational ethical arguments they may encounter. We would never convince these people. No matter how hard we’ll try.

So the conclusion derived from these claims, especially from the ethical one, is false and even peculiar, but its premise is at least partly right. It is true that mostly less caring people would procreate, and it is probable that predispositions for less caring would be passed on to their children, and it is even more likely that less caring values would be bequeathed to their children as they themselves obtain less caring values. This is still not a reason for antinatalists to consider procreation, but it is a reason for antinatalists to consider a change in their activism.

There is a threshold for our ability to influence people not to procreate and it has a lot to do with caring. If future generations would be less caring because they would be brought up by less caring parents, and maybe even maintain a less caring genetic makeup, then indeed the world would deteriorate even more. Clearly the way to stop this is not by caring people creating people as well, an option that as earlier mentioned, will not solve the problems and is more likely to make things even worse. It will not change the odds between caring and indifference. These in any case would remain significantly against us. And it is not going to change for the better any time soon. We need a comparative advantage in order to defeat the vast carelessness and indifference. And that is not going to be a knockdown rational argument, a witty meme, or an ingenious slogan.

My aim of course is not to deject any of you. I appreciate any antinatalist activism since each person not created is less suffering caused. My aim is that antinatalists would think much bigger than their near circle, and much farer than their activism lifespan. I am lamenting the fact that the suffering is never going to stop as long as antinatalists insist upon depending only on ethical arguments. This route may slowly create more antinatalism supporters, but meanwhile pro-natalists are being created in a much faster rate, diminishing more and more any option of ever turning this around. Only an external power can change this course.

In the article A New Argument for Anti-Natalism, philosopher Christopher Belshaw argues that antinatalism doesn’t necessarily entail – pro-mortalism.
Belshaw disagrees with David Benatar’s attempt to avoid pro-mortalism while arguing for antinatalism, and defines it as an ‘unstable anti-natalist and anti-mortalist mix’ which may made Benatar’s view more publically acceptable but also less consistent philosophically.

Basically, Belshaw’s criticism of Benatar is that if there is reason not to start lives, then there is reason to end them. And if the smallest amount of pain is sufficient to make life not worth starting as Benatar argues, given that everyone will experience at least some pain, Benatar’s argument for antinatalism entails pro-mortalism.
However, since I have addressed Benatar’s argument in relation to pro-mortalism in a former post, and since Belshaw himself doesn’t focus on Benatar’s argument but rather on his own argument for antinatalism, which he claims succeeds in avoiding pro-mortalism, this will be the focus of the following text.

Pleasure Springboards

Given that babies lack developed conceptions of time and of their own identities as persisting through time, Belshaw argues that as opposed to grown people who will often choose to endure pain in the present for benefits in the future, this can’t be the case with babies who don’t have desires about their longer term futures. Babies live only in the present, and have no desire to tolerate pain in order to acquire future pleasures. For someone unaware of its own future, a good future cannot make up for a bad present. Therefore, hurting babies in the present, for a benefit in the future, which they have no and can’t have an interest in, is morally unjustified.

According to Belshaw when it comes to whom who lacks developed conceptions of time, present pains are not justified by future pleasures. So babies suffer uncompensated pain. But the premise of his new argument for antinatalism goes way further than that. He claims that babies are distinct from the persons that develop from them. From his point of view the baby is one being, the person is another.
To illustrate and simplify the matter he suggests thinking about babies not as an integral gradual process of becoming a person but more in a sense of a distinctive transformation stage:

“Imagine that our relationship to a baby is like that of a butterfly to a caterpillar. Rather than a piecemeal emergence of complex psychological properties, and thus of the person, imagine instead that a baby is born, lives a baby life for about eighteen months, then falls into some sort of coma. Its life is over. After a year a pretty much fully-fledged person emerges. What should we think of this baby’s life? Is it worth living?” (p.124)

This distinction is of course very significant in an ethical sense, since not only that hurting babies is wrong because it is trading the present pains for the future pleasures of a creature who lacks developed conceptions of time, it’s a trade of pleasures and pains between different lives. And that is much worse, and highly questionable ethically.

Thinking about babies not from the point of view of the persons they supposedly become, but as a separate creature, then that creature – who has no developed notion of itself, or of time, no desire to live on into the future, no ability to think about pain and decide to endure it – experiences a lot of suffering. That is the case of even totally healthy babies. They all come into the world screaming, cry a lot, suffer colic and teething pains, stress, discomfort, emotional distress and etc. Therefore Belshaw argues that a baby’s life is not worth living.
Some may argue that a baby is an indispensable stage in creating a wholly worthwhile life, but this is not at all in the interests of, and brings about no compensations or benefits for – the baby. It would have been better for the baby had it never been created.

Belshaw argues that gradualism has no bearing here:

“Even if we come into existence by degrees, the two beings here remain distinct. And so the conclusion still stands. If we value our own lives, want there to be more people in the world, we may well continue to make babies. But what’s good for them isn’t good for us, and vice versa. We’re exploiting them, and exist only because this other creature has suffered. I may be glad that there was a baby. But it would have better for the baby never to have been born.” (p.124)

So basically his argument is that the creation of a person necessarily involves the creation of a baby which isn’t a person but is certainly a sentient creature, and one who suffers very much, without consent, and without compensation as the person that would develop from that baby is not a continuation of the baby. The creation of a person necessarily involves an exploitation of a baby. It is forcing suffering on a creature so that someone else would benefit, because it is not that the pleasures of the future person compensate the baby for its pains, and the baby has no concept or any interest in the future.

Arguable Conception and Unarguable Exploitation

Belshaw doesn’t seem to be bothered with a person being created, but with a baby being created in the process of creating a person. He is bothered with the harms caused to the baby, harms for which the baby would never be compensated. He is bothered with the harms that creating a person brings about not to the person created but to the baby which is according to him, although an indispensable stage of a person, still a separate entity.
Since Belshaw separates between a person and the baby that person had developed from, his argument is actually more of a version of the harm to others argument than it is a version of Benatar’s argument. Only that in Belshaw’s version of the harm to others argument, although there should be no disputes regarding the ‘harm’ part, there are many regarding the ‘others’ element. While his distinction between a baby and the person that grows from that baby is disputable, in the case of the original version of the harm to others argument, meaning absolutely unquestionable harms caused to absolutely unquestionable others, there is no room for any dispute. The only reason that nevertheless there is much dispute is because people are speciesist and careless about the suffering of others, not because the sacrifice of trillions of sentient creatures can ever be ethically justified.

The specific distinction Belshaw claims for may be arguable but the sentiment isn’t.
Even if it is disputable that each person necessarily exploits the baby that s/he supposedly developed from and that each person exists only because a baby has suffered, given that each person needs to feed oneself, dress oneself, clean oneself, clean oneself’s clothes, heat oneself in the winter, cool oneself in the summer, live somewhere, work somewhere, move around somehow, entertain oneself, consume enormous amounts of energy, produce enormous amounts of waste, and etc., and considering that each of these necessarily harm others, it is undisputable that each person necessarily exploits others and that each person exists only because others have suffered.

And people don’t even seem to care that much about the fact that numerous other sentient creatures are suffering so they can enjoy themselves. Most are still choosing, time and again, the most harmful ways to feed themselves and regardless of how harmful it is to others. Harming others while consuming food is inevitable, even if it is plant based, local, organic and seasonable, but most people insist on the worst kinds of food production, ones that involve the greatest exploitation and suffering. Therefore, in most cases, creating a person is sacrificing chickens to be cramped into tiny cages with each forced to live in a space the size of an A4 paper, calves to be separated from their mothers, and cow mothers to be left traumatized by the abduction of their babies, pigs to suffer from chronic pain and various diseases, sheep to suffer from lameness, turkeys to barely stand as a result of their unproportionate bodies, ducks to live out of water and in filthy crowded sheds, rabbits to be imprisoned in an iron cage the size of their bodies, geese to be aggressively plucked for their feathers, and male chicks to be gassed, crushed or suffocated since they are unexploitable for eggs or meat.

So even if you reject Belshaw’s distinction within a person, the following description he made is surly the case when it comes to a person’s relation with others “we are inevitably free-riding on the several misfortunes of small, helpless and shortlived creatures”.

Even if you disagree with Belshaw’s distinction between the future person’s supposed wholly worthwhile life and the baby’s lack of any interest, compensations or benefits for that, you can’t disagree that other creatures surly lack of any interest, compensations or benefits for a person’s supposed wholly worthwhile life. Even if we refuse to accept Belshaw’s distinction, the thousands of creatures overall that would be harmed so a person would benefit, will not be compensated. Therefore even without his distinction move, the creation of a person is indeed a trade of pleasures and pains across different lives.

Belshaw’s argument may be new but in some ways it reflects on an old problem. He deeply emphasis the exploitation of babies for the pleasures of persons, yet he deeply ignores the obvious exploitation – one that doesn’t require the metaphysical complexity of differentiating between a person and the baby from which that person had developed – of probably thousands of nonhuman animals by each human person.

Preventing that suffering is my main motivation. And people being so speciesist and careless about the suffering of others is my main reason not to wait for them to change.
If Belshaw’s main motivation is to prevent babies from being sacrificed for the sake of persons while avoiding pro-mortalism for persons, he can support a non-pro-mortalist option, but still ensure that people will stop sacrificing babies. Although for slightly different motives and perceptions than mine, he can support forced sterilization.

References

Benatar, D. Better Never to Have Been (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)

Belshaw, C. A New Argument for Anti-Natalism South African Journal of Philosophy 31 (1) 117-127(2012)

Like many other antinatalists, I am referring to procreation as a crime, a very serious one.
This definition is often counter argued by claims such as that procreation is not a crime since as opposed to cases of supposedly real crimes, in procreation there is no intention to harm, and according to pro-natalists it is actually the exact opposite.
Since I have addressed the alleged opposite intention of procreation along many former texts, here I’ll only shortly address the aspect of the seemingly unintended harm in procreation.

Allegedly, there is a difference between crimes which are considered as crimes and the crime of procreation which is not considered as one by non-antinatalists, since the first case is of causing intended harm and the latter is being consciously aware of harm with no explicit intention of causing it. However, when people are aware that their unnecessary actions are bound with inevitable harm how is that unintentional? Not wishing to harm another person by performing an action might be less wrong than performing an action with an intention to harm another person, but knowing that harm is inevitable is enough to make that harm intentional even if the harm was not intended but an unintended inevitable consequence of an action with a different intention. In other words, if people are consciously causing unnecessary harm to someone else, or consciously unnecessarily put someone in harm’s way, the fact that causing that unnecessary harm to another person wasn’t their intention doesn’t make it less of a crime as long as they were aware of inevitably causing unnecessary harm.

One explicit example of an inevitable harm is death. Given that everyone must die, people who procreate are intentionally creating people who would necessarily die. They would also necessarily be harmed by many other things, but even if we’ll assume that that is speculative, despite that clearly it is definitely not, everyone must surly die. Although people don’t procreate with the intention of causing their children’s death, they are aware of their children’s inevitable death. And so all parents can’t avoid intentionally creating people who would inevitably die.

People might truly not want their children to be harmed, but they are willing to force them to be harmed so they themselves won’t be harmed by not creating them.
That claim can be exemplified by anticipating parents’ reply to an hypothetical proposal such as will they be willing to trade a guarantee that their children would never be harmed and will always be happy, in exchange for them never seeing them again, which probably only a few if any parent would agree to. This thought experiment is an exemplification of the fact that people don’t create people for these people’s sake but out of their own interests.

Of course, there is no need for this thought experiment to prove that all procreations are self-interested as no procreation can even theoretically be about the created person as no one has an interest in being created before being forced to exist, nor is it needed to prove that had people truly cared about their children not being harmed they would have chosen the surest, most reliable and absolutely guaranteed way to prevent any harm caused to any of them which is of course to never create them in the first place. However, the fact people don’t procreate to intentionally harm their children but would not intentionally give their children up so to protect them from any harm by choosing that option in this fictional deal, or by choosing not to create them in real life, is another indication of their nevertheless intentional harm.

People prefer that their children would suffer from everything that they would suffer from during their whole life, which at least some of it is necessarily known in advance like the just mentioned inevitable fact of death, and also the accompanied fear of death, not to mention all the suffering they would cause to others during their whole life time, and all that so they would not suffer themselves from not breeding. This is how selfish people are. So selfish that it is pointless to try and convince them not to procreate for moral reasons. So selfish that we need to find by-passes in order to prevent them from breeding and by that prevent all the suffering that would have been caused to the children they would have created had it been up to them, and all the suffering that the children that they would have created had it been up to them would have caused to others.

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

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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.

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2012 Bioethics ISSN 0269-9702