Antinatalism

Antinatalism or anti-natalism is the philosophical value judgment that procreation is unethical or unjustifiable. Antinatalists thus argue that people should abstain from making children. Some antinatalists consider coming into existence to always be a serious harm. Their views are not necessarily limited only to human beings but may encompass all sentient creatures, arguing that coming into existence is a serious harm for sentient beings in general. There are various reasons why antinatalists believe human reproduction is problematic. The most common arguments for antinatalism include imposing a risk of serious harm onto someone else, causing instances of inevitable suffering (for example dying) without consent (because one cannot choose whether or not they come into existence), and the indirect harms caused by any human being to other people, animals and the environment. There is also an axiological asymmetry between good and bad things in life, such that coming into existence is always a harm, which is known as Benatar's asymmetry argument. Antinatalism as a philosophical concept is to be distinguished from antinatalist policies employed by some countries (governmental population control measures). In antinatalist population policy, it is not always implied that coming into existence is a universal problem and is an ever-present harm to the one whose existence was started. There exists a taxonomy that divides the so-called "antiprocreative" (at times called antinatalist) thought into four major branches: childfreeness, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT), efilism (an ideology that advocates for extreme promortalism and forced extinction), and antinatalism itself. Only the latter one is philosophical antinatalism per se, meeting the definition of philosophical antinatalism and having no other features on top of that, whereas the first three items can only be deemed antinatalistic in the sense that they oppose the alleged duty to procreate.