A common comment that antinatalists often hear, despite explaining that their position is a matter of an ethical principle, is ‘so you don’t like babies?’
Beneath this very common question, which is more of a claim, are hiding some of the major problems involved with procreation.

First of all, as argued in a text called Creating a New Person Not Having a Baby, people are not ‘having a baby’ but are creating a new person. People seem to disregard the fact that after a short period of infancy, which many of them are very fond of, comes most of the created person’s life. Creating someone is getting into a lifelong commitment with a person, not with a baby; a person whose parents have no idea what s/he is like, a fact most people are overlooking when talking about liking or disliking babies.

And a more important matter in this regard is that when framing procreation as ‘having a baby’, even the tiny minority of people who do bother to consider possible harms inflicted on their children before creating them, usually focus on harms typical of babies, not on harms typical of an entire human life, such as pain, frustration, fear, loneliness, boredom, disappointment, sickness, rejection, humiliation, injustice, pointlessness, deterioration, anxiety, and death; despite that all are inevitable eventually. Only that they don’t think about what is eventual for babies, but about how adorable they are.

Secondly, what’s love got to do with it? It is not about love. Asking an antinatalist if s/he doesn’t like babies is like asking animal rights activists if they don’t like meat, or asking feminists if they don’t like men. Love has nothing to do with that. Antinatalism is an ethical stand, an ideology, a matter of principle, not of dislike. It is wrong to address such a serious matter as creating new people from the prism of liking or disliking. Creating people is not a hobby. It is the most important decision that would ever be made for another person. Of course, that alone is a very good reason to never procreate, and it is definitely a very good reason not to address it as something that people do if they like children and don’t if they don’t.

Although white people who fought against slavery and against racial segregation, were called ‘Niger Lovers’ in real time, clearly we don’t think that was their motive, or that it is even relevant, but rather that it was ethical principles of liberty and the idea that all people are equal regardless of the color of their skin that motivated them. The same goes for current struggles against racism, and against other forms of discrimination against other groups of society. Like in the case of white activists against slavery about 200 years ago, we still hear homophobes saying especially to straight male activists against LGBT discrimination that maybe they like guys as well, but obviously we know that the real reason behind straight males who participate in demonstrations against LGBT discrimination is that they are dissent equalitarian people who just care about people who are being discriminated against for arbitrary reasons. We don’t need to like discriminated against people to act in their favor, all we need is to hate discrimination. And that’s exactly the reason and motive behind antinatalism. It is not about liking or disliking babies, it is about caring for others, and about hating to see them being harmed by life.

Thirdly, if love has got to do with it, so from one song title to another, if you love somebody set them free.
I am a great dog lover. Every time I see one my mood immediately gets better, and they always make me smile. But that doesn’t make me want there to be many dogs out there so I can see them. If anything, my love for dogs makes me feel the opposite. Because I am aware there are so many miserable and lonely dogs that live in this world, with so many of them developing physical and mental issues (often because of people’s ignorant or cruel insistency to breed kinds of dogs who are prone to many health issues), with so many dogs locked in pounds, with so many killed because they are not adopted, with so many viciously abandoned, with so many tortured in labs, and so many tortured in meat markets, my love for dogs makes me want there to be no dogs, so all these miseries would be prevented from them. Love is supposed to be unselfish and be focused on the other, not the self. So if anything, my love for dogs makes me want to protect them all from the miserable lives many of them would be forced to endure.
It is not about love, not with dogs and not with human babies, but if it was, then the moral imperative should be as the title of one of Julio Cabrera’s books’ – Because I Love You, You Will Not Be Born!

Fourthly, this question reflects how selfish and self-absorbed procreation really is. That is because behind the assumption, that anyone who chooses not to have a baby probably doesn’t like them and anyone who does do, is the concealed yet clear statement that it is all about the creators. The hidden assumption is that if people like something they can go ahead and have it. The option of people thinking that they shouldn’t have everything they like just because they like it, is not part of the premises of the question, otherwise they would assume that at least some people do like babies but don’t think they are permitted to create them.

Behind this question there is a hidden assumption about the relation between liking babies and creating them – people who like babies create them and people who don’t like babies don’t, and that makes creating people some sort of a hobby, something that people are doing if they want to, and don’t if they don’t want to. It discloses how absent the created persons themselves are from the discussion. It reveals how instrumentalizing procreation really is. It implies that creating persons is creating cute gadgets for their creators.
Behind this question, in many senses, there is a latent claim which is that creating people is, in the eyes of anyone who isn’t antinatalist, a potential experience that people can choose to have or not to have, according to them liking or disliking babies, and while ignoring the fact that the created people have no option to choose anything about their own creation. In this text I don’t focus on how ethically wrong it is to impose life on someone, as I have discussed this issue elsewhere. But I do emphasis that the question reveals the selfishness of the creators and the total disregard for the created people. Under the formulation of this pro-natalist question, people are forced with existence – which at least for some of them is expected to be miserable; and to each and every one of them, at least at some point, at least to some extent, would be harmful – because other people, people who are not them, like how cute they are when they start their lives.

Lastly, even if procreation would have created forever babies and not people who start as babies, and even if it was about love and even if people could have somehow ensured the protection of their objects of love and so it wouldn’t be relevant to claim that because we love them they will not be created, and even if we dearly love babies-children-people, as long as we hate suffering we must never procreate, because we can’t prevent our children from causing much of it to many others.

Disliking babies is not the reason behind antinatalism, disliking suffering is. Suffering caused to the created person and by the created person is the motive behind antinatalism. And since both types are inevitable, procreation is always ethically impermissible.

I don’t dislike babies, I dislike procreation. And that is not because procreation creates babies but because procreation creates suffering. The greatest crime of procreation is creating a new and unnecessary unit of suffering, exploitation and pollution, which is added to the already billions of units of suffering, exploitation and pollution. Units of suffering, exploitation and pollution mustn’t exist.
That is the main reason why procreation is morally prohibited and so must necessarily be stopped as soon as possible.