JD Vance, Antinatalism, and Climate Change
In the wake of J D Vance’s childless cat lady comments in reference to Kamala Harris (yes, I am childless and, yes, I have a cat), I keyed the phrase ‘having children is selfish’ into Google. It wasn’t just J D Vance. I’d been talking with my mother about Jennifer Aniston’s reply to his statement, and how many people these days, whether due to infertility, age, same sex coupledom, or other reasons, now turn to IVF. I could see my mother’s befuddlement when I said, ‘what’s the big thing about IVF, why don’t people just adopt?’
Of course, I refer to regions of the world where access to birth control is easy. Even then, I get that many of us are ‘Oops’ babies. I don’t have a problem with that. I admit to having thrown caution to the wind along with my undergarments, feeling the inevitable stomach-knot until my next period, the relief knowing I wouldn’t spend the next two years changing nappies. In fact, I’ve always figured the world could do just fine without my genes. After all, there are 8 billion others (tattoo that number!) all reproducing away. The idea of deliberately introducing a new life just because ‘I’ want a baby, never sat with me. It seemed, well, selfish. Though some would call it selfless.
Let’s go back to Vance’s word-spew. In politics where ‘optics’ is the buzzword he seems to be implying that being childless is bad for the image. A reason to see someone as unworthy, unfit, lesser. Darn it, Vance, I feel invalidated, go get me some sperm (not yours) and a turkey baster. In his opinion, wanting a child has less to do with the life you are about to create (which will now have to survive for the next eighty years hoping it has access to decent education and medical care), and more to do with letting the world know you’re virile. Because if you’re not virile, well you’re just goddam failure.
It’s our duty I hear (some people) cry, to procreate. Religious: we’re created in God’s image. Atheist: we must fulfil our biological function as human beings. Okay. Number one, narcissistic. Number two, my biological function is also to eat, shit and sleep. Three out of four is good with me. I like babies. I like children, even adults (the latter in a general altruistic sense). I also agree that many reasons for not having kids might be a touch misanthropic. I will come to that. For the moment, let’s take things in context. 8 billion. I repeat 8 billion people. All needing unlimited food, water, shelter, medicine and places to shit. Global warming at an all-time high. Sea level rise alarming. Extreme weather events on the increase. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my foot-soles melting onto the tarmac. I don’t want my town burned in a wildfire or my phone to stop working because the thermometer has burst. I don’t want to be blown into the sea at Largs in the middle of July in a hailstorm. And, unless you’ve had your head up the proverbial hole, you’ll have noticed all the global and proxy wars (or more accurately, slaughters), the desperate geopolitical manoeuvring over oil, water, transport, shipping, borders, the refugee crises. Not to mention bloody sectarian intolerance in every corner of the globe. You don’t need me to tell you about the state of the world, right? You read the papers, watch TV, YouTube, whatever. But, never mind that now because, guess what: I really, really, really want a baby. Isn’t it great?
Are you happy for me?
No, I’m not!
Is it just me? Am I so flawed, so very awfully in denial about my clearly chronic misanthropy. So emotionally immature (I admit to all of the above)… But can you see my point? Back to my Google search (thank you, Google, for validating me without my having to reproduce). The search results linked me to such discussions as: ‘How can we morally justify having kids since it’s entirely the selfish desire of the parents to have them?’ and ‘Why is it universally accepted that parents have the right to bring children into this world?’ and ‘Are there any altruistic reasons to have kids?’ Answers ranged from: people have children because of some phony image in their head of how ‘beautiful’ it is; because they’d been told ‘when you grow up you’ll be a mommy, too,’; because they want to be loved, looked after in old age; because kids are cute, before they grow up and become real people; because parents want to be grandparents; because people want to leave something after they’re gone (try a charity donation in your will); they want an object they can own like an accessory; they think their genes are special despite the fact there’s already 8 BILLION of us on the planet. And perhaps the most stupid: because not having a child is unfair to those who want a child and can’t have one. A slightly less misanthropic and wiser argument (I said I’d come back to it) is that people with such negative views should perhaps not be parents anyway, and that better reasons not to have children are the gains in free time and money, and not contributing to the burden of overpopulation and climate change.
And so it was I learned a word for my views, antinatalism, the philosophical belief that having children is unethical. Antinatalism has its roots in early religion as well as in literature from Sophocles[1] to Flaubert[2] and Ursula K Le Guin[3]. Schopenhauer espoused antinatalist views [4], with David Benatar, dubbed the world’s most pessimistic philosopher (ha ha), being its most contemporary advocate. Well, his book is called, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, (2006). The antinatalism argument is that life involves suffering and, as it is morally reprehensible to inflict suffering on another person without their consent and, as a child cannot consent to being born, bringing someone into existence is therefore is a harmful act. Oh, you philosophers, you are a hoot. At best, bringing a person into the world can only be done for the good of someone else (potentially), but not for the good of the person being created.
I like being alive. I am painfully aware, though, that my current state of contentment is linked to many other factors. I currently have food, shelter. I’m not being bombed or living in a prison camp. I’m not being trafficked. No one is pointing a gun at me. I’m not suffering unbearable pain due to a terrible disease. I know that the line of separation between myself and these other situations is very, very, very thin.
There is a condition called solastalgia. It is a feeling of existential distress caused by climate change. In 2018, in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, a 60-year-old lawyer called David Buckel set himself on fire. His suicide note said, ‘my early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves.’ In 2022, Wynn Bruce self-immolated in front of the Supreme Court Building in Washington DC in protest against climate change. In February 2024, Aaron Bushnell, a US serviceman, self-immolated in full uniform outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC protesting against the war on Gaza. Perhaps the definition of solastalgia needs to be expanded. These were all someone’s child. Being childless, it’s easy to imagine the security of a family that is ‘my own.’ A place of safety, a way of anchoring my reality in the world. Outside the hyperobjects of war, poverty and climate change. Would I put that image into practice? Not me. If I had my time over (FFS, I’m saying that now), I’d rather adopt a child than create a new person. Am I crazy? Unworthy? Lesser? Or is it time for us to have a conversation? Anyone? Feel free to leave a comment/insult …
- ‘Not to be born is, beyond all estimation, best’. Sophocles, Oedipus.
- ‘The idea of bringing someone into the world fills me with horror… may I transmit to no one the aggravations and the disgrace of existence.’ Gustave Flaubert, The Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830-1857, 1846.
- The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (1973) by Ursula K Le Guin, about a utopian city where the well-being of the citizens depends on the suffering of one child who is being tortured out of sight, has been linked to antinatalism.
- ‘If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist?’ Parerga and Paralipomina (1851), Schopenhauer.
We are supported only by our readers. We don't have corporate backers and we don't take advertising, so we rely entirely on your support.
Help to support independent Scottish journalism
It’s not complicated. Procreation is the meaning of life. We are here to create more life, and that’s about it as far as important stuff goes. The rest is mostly a means to do so, preferably with some music.
I think you missed out the demographic competition aspect, where groups try to (in crude terms) outbreed each other, either for mass mobilisation (bigger armies) or to gain voting superiority or whatever. The latter is sometimes assumed to be the case in Northern Ireland, where Catholics have larger families, the supposition that by voting as a bloc they will eventually be strong enough to vote for Independence. The demographic struggle in Israel-Palestine is relevant in various ways: high birth rates of Palestinians offset by Israeli genocide; the ‘Ultra-Orthodox’ Jews who have much larger families than secular Jews and are expected to become a majority this century if trends were to continue (perhaps an unlikely projection).
Enclaves are similarly likely to promote faster breeding, especially those facing a much larger neighbour.
“Until 2021, the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar had the strictest prohibition on abortion in Europe.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Gibraltar
I was on a course which had a discussion of why enslaved women in the British Caribbean sometimes chose to use abortifacients, sometimes chose to have a child (possibly as a result of rape). I don’t think there were any easy answers. But some of those children grew up to become Maroons and fought the racist filth of the British Empire to a standstill. Some grew up to be redcoats.
“The latter is sometimes assumed to be the case in Northern Ireland, where Catholics have larger families, the supposition that by voting as a bloc they will eventually be strong enough to vote for Independence.”
Assumed by whom, do you think?
@Derek Thomson, the Guardian presents a summary:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/22/catholics-outnumber-protestants-northern-ireland-census
Obviously it is more complicated than that, but surely nobody disputes that ‘Northern Ireland’ was a British imperial state political confection designed to gerrymander a portion of a colony to have a persistent Protestant majority based on the descendants of the original plantation of Ulster?
Settler colonialism meets religion meets nativism. The Irish Times mentions some declassified files covering historical British projections, but I haven’t had time to look into these (no references were given).
Aye, it’s just that it’s more or less the theory that is trotted out by racists, the “great replacement”, is it not?
@Derek Thomson, it is census data and demographics, and variations on the Christian cultural application of ‘go forth and multiply’, I guess. Not sure where theory comes into it. New generations replace old generations, as from time immemorial. New culture replaces old. Good riddance to bad traditions, superstition and bigotry. And maybe someday we will have secular government in these isles.
This applies the British imperial metropole as much as the Irish republic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secularism_in_the_Republic_of_Ireland#:~:text=The%20Constitution%20of%20Ireland%20says,indirectly%20to%20endow%20any%20religion%22.
But at least the Irish republic has a codified constitution whose content can be replaced by democratic means.
“At best, bringing a person into the world can only be done for the good of someone else (potentially), but not for the good of the person being created”.
So true; people shouldn’t be playing God with their potential children’s lives…
Great piece
I have always been baffled by the argument that not wanting to reproduce is selfish. When I tell people that if I wanted children I would adopt, in order to help someone who is already in this hell realm rather than create someone new to suffer, the most common response is, “Oh, the baby has to come from me.” Is this not the very essence of selfishness?
In 1959, in his song We Will All Go Together When We Go, Tom Lehrer sang of the possibility of nuclear war, imagining the human dead as “Nearly three billion hunks of well-done steak.” Now, only 65 years later, there are more than eight billion humans. How can this be sustainable?
I think you are overthinking this.
I never wanted to have children either but the times were not condusive to a then 17year old with no idea of self care or any agency.Great article. It’s a well overdue conversation. And yes it is complicated.
I’m not sure about the philosophy, as WT so succinctly puts it, are you overthinking this matter? But whilst we can be amused by such recondite philosophies, there is underlying a hugely serious, existential issue. What I am much more certain about are demographics, science, material resources and one finite planet. When I was born in 1946 the world’s population was around 2.5 billion, it’s now more than three times as many. Yet almost universally the idea of that 8 billion people might well be overpopulation is dismissed as some sort of threat to our humanity, e.g. the fuss about the threat of low birth rates in many countries. George Monbiot regularly refuses to admit to overpopulation, yet he’s a well known concerned conservationist, worried about humanity’s threat to nature and the room it needs to thrive. Yet I ask a simple rhetorical question, if the world is not presently overpopulated, then logically it must be inferred that when I was born, the world must have been seriously underpopulated? . So, was it the case in 1946 the world’s population was somehow inadequate to make any of the advances in science, engineering, medicine etc that have happened since? I think that argument just doesn’t hold water. The world population when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon was 3.6 billion., less than half its present number. In response to which, what country can anyone point to that has a population policy? Even with immigration, which most countries have absolute control over, there appears to be almost universal chaos and abandonment of rational thinking.
The fact is that people will procreate, for the most part. First, it’s quite an enjoyable process. Second, most folk are brought up in reasonably happy families, it’s natural folk will wish to recreate this for themselves. In many countries, your children are your investment for survivability in old age etc etc. But is it wise for humanity to procreate so prolifically? It has been claimed that fourteen percent of all the humans who have ever lived on this planet are alive today.
We have already serious overshot the planet’s sustainable capacities in water, food, soil, marine life, atmospheric pollution, mineral extraction, natural diversity, etc. I don’t know what a long term, i.e. ten thousand year, planetary human capacity is, but it will be likely less than one billion if this population wishes to live something approaching a comfortable “advanced” existence like we enjoy now, and not merely surviving in meanness and adversity . In a stable organised planetary society of one billion, having two children if you chose to do so will be your right, and your privilege. But for today’s seriously overpopulated planet, this does not apply, not having children is a perfectly rational and moral decision, but of course if whole cultures take this advice and other cultures don’t , then your own culture will ultimately disappear.
@John Monro, perhaps the question should be: how much of Earth should humans set aside for other forms of life?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-Earth
I think the danger is in underthinking things. That’s how we blunder into catastrophes that will limit human popular will-we nill-we.
The wonderful Harry Harrison wrote an amusing short story, ‘Make Room! Make Room!’ of a family’s quest for privacy in an overpopulated world. It might still be worth reading, but who knows – I read it in 1966 when the world population was 3.6bn. We don’t have a pollution problem, we have a people problem.