Extinction event

Raphael Samuel rocketed to sudden worldwide fame when he filed a lawsuit against his parents—for bringing him into the world without his consent.

That was six years ago. Today, the 32-year-old martial arts trainer from India admits the move was mostly a publicity stunt. Samuel wasn’t at all surprised when a judge tossed the case less than a year after he filed it. But the ideas behind the lawsuit—the ones he wanted to call attention to—are perfectly serious.

Samuel is an antinatalist. He and others like him around the globe believe it’s morally wrong to have children—under any circumstances. And they’re on a mission to convince people to stop procreating. Antinatalists worldwide are a vocal minority, but their position has gained more attention as climate concerns hit a fever pitch and a 24-hour news cycle spotlights an unceasing parade of human misery.

At its core, antinatalism is about “the ending of suffering,” according to Amanda Sukenick, a 41-year-old artist and leading antinatalist thinker and influencer. Sukenick hosts The Exploring Antinatalism Podcast and recently co-authored a book on the subject with Finnish philosopher Matti Häyry.

Sukenick said antinatalism first caught her eye as she scrolled YouTube videos about 15 years ago. “Antinatalism very much felt like ‘This is the answer,’” Sukenick said. “There’s absolutely no reason for human beings to keep perpetuating suffering.”

But it took her a while to publicly embrace the idea. It felt like such a radical notion, one that cut “against the grain of everything.”

Although Greek philosophers such as Sophocles decried the harms of existence as early as the fifth century B.C., the modern antinatalism movement dates to 2006. That year, two philosophers—David Benatar in South Africa and Théophile de Giraud in Belgium—separately published books coining the phrase.

Very little research exists on antinatalism, so it’s impossible to know the exact scale of the movement. Sukenick said the patchwork of online antinatalist Facebook groups and Reddit threads are the best metric that currently exists. In 2019, the BBC reported there are “dozens of antinatalist groups, some with thousands of members” online, including the popular Reddit thread r/antinatalism, which now lists over 200,000 members.

Sukenick said antinatalist groups are now springing up everywhere, with large followings in India and the Arabic-speaking world. Other hot spots include parts of Europe, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan, according to another antinatalist leader, Lawrence Anton.

Anton is an animal rights activist in the U.K. who became interested in antinatalism after overhearing a discussion about it during an exchange program in Sweden. A few months later, he started investigating antinatalism on his own and eventually became persuaded by several of David Benatar’s interviews and debates.

Anton said there are three main arguments for antinatalism. One is Benatar’s “axiological asymmetry,” which posits the pain resulting from existence tips the scales in favor of never being born—a state Benatar deems neutral.

The other two arguments boil down to the concepts of “consent” and “risk.” Since “sex without consent is rape” and “work without consent is slavery,” antinatalists view birth without consent as an equally great injustice. And they see the inherent gamble of life as simply too great.

“We think of children who are born and have a very short and brutal life and then maybe die of cancer,” Anton said. “The risk that your child could be one of those cases is enough not to create the child.”

That wasn’t an easy conclusion for Anton. He had always wanted to have kids, and the realization that he probably wouldn’t came with some “emotional discord.” But he said that sadness faded as he became more convinced of his position.

Now, Anton runs an organization called Antinatalist Advocacy and leads street outreach events across London. In October, he and a handful of other antinatalists gathered at an intersection in the city’s Camden neighborhood and held signs with slogans like “Procreation requires moral justification” and “Make love, not babies.”

The mastermind behind these slogans is a man who goes by the name of “Dietz” in media interviews. He is the founder of the antinatalist organization Stop Having Kids (SHK) and creates graphics for others to use in their own activism.

Since starting SHK in 2021, Dietz has expanded the group’s social media presence, funded billboards with SHK mantras, and led street outreach events of his own. He said he’s gotten mixed reactions and plenty of pushback.

“You get a lot of people who tell you to kill yourself, actually,” Dietz said. “Because they somehow equate not having children to killing humans.”

Lots of people Dietz talks to outline religious reasons for having kids, such as the Biblical command to “be fruitful and multiply.” Others worry about who will pay into Social Security or care for the elderly if humans start voluntarily dying out. Almost everyone he talks to seems to feel that there’s something about human existence that makes it worth perpetuating—even if they can’t really articulate why.

Activist “Dietz” promotes an antinatalist message on the streets of Bend, Ore. stophavingkids.org

Still, birth rates around the world are plummeting, despite efforts to slow the decline. But that doesn’t necessarily mean people are flocking to the antinatalist movement. The most common reason U.S. adults under 50 report for not having children, according to a 2024 Pew Research Center survey, is that they simply don’t want to, rather than a conviction that childbearing itself is wrong. Dietz has also met lots of people who tell him they believe “some people shouldn’t have kids” or that people shouldn’t have kids amid a perceived climate crisis.

But the idea that no one should have kids, ever? That’s a tougher sell.

Critics are also concerned over the nasty rhetoric riddling many online antinatalist forums. Participants often use terms like breeders or breediots to describe parents and post comments ranting about children or railing against society.

Others argue antinatalism fosters a new type of eugenics through its quality of life arguments about the value of human life. Amanda Sukenick argues antinatalism is the “exact opposite” of eugenics since the goal is “to create nobody” rather than selecting who should live based on genetic characteristics.

But Sukenick admits some antinatalists, such as her friend and self-described “soft” antinatalist philosopher David Pierce, believe humans will never stop having kids, and so “the correct answer is to genetically modify human beings to not experience negative states,” Sukenick said.

“There’s no secret that that would require some form of eugenics,” Sukenick added, insisting she and many others in the movement aren’t comfortable with this idea.

Sukenick isn’t interested in putting an artificially happy face on antinatalism. She admits people in the community are “at each other’s throats all the time” and discussions can easily get “tense and aggressive.” She said one reason so many threads devolve into dark rhetoric is that people have a lot of pent-up anger about what they perceive as their own and ­others’ needless suffering.

She thinks some degree of negativity is “inevitable” when people reach the conclusion “two people’s selfishness” was the only reason they came into existence. For many antinatalists, including Sukenick, this philosophy is the “last stop” on the “there-is-no-God train”—the logical outflow of a worldview where human life is an “accident of science.”

“If there is no God, then there really is no reason to keep bringing new people here,” Sukenick said. “Life has all kinds of great stuff in it, but it comes at a tremendous price.”

World birth rates

South Korea currently has the lowest birth rate in the world; Niger has the highest

Illustration: Checkat/Getty Images; Data Source: Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs

• A birth rate of 2.1 per woman is considered “replacement rate,” meaning enough births to maintain a population at its current level.

• By 2080 worldwide, persons aged 65 or older will outnumber children under 18.

• The world’s population is expected to peak at around 10.3 billion people in the mid-2080s, up from 8.2 billion in 2024.

• 1 in 4 people globally lives in a country where population has already peaked.

• The world produces enough food to feed all of its people. Deaths from hunger have more to do with human conflict than lack of supply.

—compiled by Jenny Lind Schmitt