Some antinatalists argue that the only way to justify creating a person is if the parents are willing to “fix what they broke”. Meaning, that people are permitted to create a person if they are ready and are committed to compensate their child for harms, including assisting suicide to their child if the child asks for it, regardless of it being illegal; and they are certainly not allowed to try to prevent their children from carrying out suicide if they choose to.

I sympathize with the logic behind the argument that given that parents risk their children’s well-being, let alone in an attempt to improve their own, then if their children’s well-being ends up being poor and undesirable in their own view, the parents are obligated to return their children to their previous state, but since this option is even theoretically impossible simply because there is no pre-existing state someone was in before being created or can somehow go back to, procreation is impermissible under this condition just as much.

Beyond the lawfulness issue and beyond the unlikeliness that parents would not try to prevent their children from carrying out suicide if they choose to, let alone provide them with assistance, carrying out suicide doesn’t compensate anyone for anything. Harms done are not retroactively being undone once a person doesn’t exist anymore. Existence can’t be undone. Things can happen but can never “unhappen”. There are no, and there could be no compensations for the harms endured in existence when it ends. Ending one’s existence can only stop the current harms and prevent the future ones, but it can’t compensate for past harms.

Suicide cannot compensate anyone for the suffering of existence, but can only stop the continuance of the suffering of existence. It can’t retroactively justify the existence of someone who doesn’t want to live, or wish s/he had never existed. The harm can never be compensated for nor justified, even if the parents provide assistance, and even if suicide was fast, fearless, absolutely sure, plain, painless and harmless to others, which it is definitely none of the above. Carrying out suicide is always difficult, scary, unsure, dangerous, potentially painful, and rarely unharmful to people who knew the person carrying it out, including the parents, and despite them (under the conditions of this argument) making a prior agreement to assist or at least not hold back their children if that’s what they wish for.

Even people who have decided to end their life, and even people whom their life was a continuance misery, are naturally and biologically built to fear death, and they are obviously afraid of pain, of permanently disabling themselves if they don’t succeed in carrying out suicide. Some fear that they are committing a sin, some fear of what they view as the unknown, some of breaking the law, of being socially shamed, of being blamed for selfishness, of the option of isolation ward in a psychiatric hospital, and etc. All that as well as the fact that people are biologically built to survive, make many people prisoners of their biological mechanisms and social norms. They are trapped in horrible lives without a truly viable option to end it, even if their parents would agree, and even if they would provide them with assistance.

People must overcome too many obstacles with each being too difficult, for suicide to really be an option. And even if it wasn’t the case, carrying out suicide, even if was absolutely safe, easy and free of any collateral damage, as aforementioned, doesn’t by any means compensate for a miserable existence.

No one should take the risk that their children would suffer so much that they would not only want to die, but that they would overcome all these obstacles and try to do something about it, or won’t because they are too afraid or because they care too much about the people who care about them. No one should put anyone in such a horrible position where they don’t want to live but are trapped in life.

Compensation to Others

Even if parents’ preacceptance that they might have to assist their children with ending their own lives if they want to, was a relevant “fix” and compensation for their children’s miserable existence, given that creating a person is not only gambling on that person’s life, but also, if not first and foremost, ensuring that more sentient beings, probably tens of thousands of them, would be forced to endure miserable lives so to support and pleasure the created person, and given that compensation is even less relevant in their cases, procreation is a unidirectional thing for tens of thousands, and is unfixable for each and every one of them.

Before discussing the relevancy and feasibility of compensating and fixing a potential problem of a person who doesn’t yet exist so to justify its creation, people must ensure compensation and that they can fix the certain problems of everyone who would be harmed due to that person’s creation. And obviously that is impossible. How can people compensate everyone who would be sacrificed and otherwise harmed by the people they will create? How can they compensate everyone who would be genetically modified so to provide the maximum meat possible for the to-be born persons? How can they compensate everyone who would be imprisoned for their entire lives? How can they compensate everyone who would be forced to live without their family for their entire lives? How can they compensate everyone who would suffer chronic pain and maladies for their entire lives? How can they compensate everyone who would never breathe clean air, walk on grass, bath in water, and eat natural food?

Procreation is not only taking a risk of causing harm to the person created, it is indifferently deciding to cause harms to everyone who would be harmed by the person created.
None of them can be compensated for any of it. Not the created person and not any of its victims.

The first broken thing that people must fix before creating more people is the enormous harm each of them is causing. And that is not likely to happen. Ever.
Given that no person is harmed by the life that s/he had never lived, but tens of thousands are harmed by the life that each person does live, not only that when it comes to procreation there is no way to fix what is broken, it keeps breaking and breaking more and more things all the time. And that requires a real fix.