PS: The point here is NOT that poor people shouldn't have kids, it's that no one should be having kids without having the basics of childcare covered, which necessitates widespread systemic, societal, and economic change so that no parent needs to worry about those basics, and kids can grow up in secure, healthy environments. I completely forgot to mention this when I originally posted it, and that's my bad.
I mean considering the alternative is they don’t have access to food, housing, healthcare, and are essentially forced by circumstance to either become criminals or throw themselves into the meat grinder.
Now I don’t even like arguing this anymore since reproductive rights in my neck of the woods have gone away, but you can’t seriously think that giving a kid a miserable, painful life is better than not having a kid at all
I can, actually. Mostly because even growing up in poverty is rarely just a "miserable, painful life" even somewhere like Burkina Faso but also because collectively providing for the next generation is a thing that we should be constantly pushing for, culturally and publicly. Because without a future there is nothing to fight for, without youth there is nobody to care for the old, without fresh eyes there is no passion for change.
I can’t help it. I’m glad to be infertile. Children born right now would inevitably face the extreme results of a climate crisis, depleting fresh water stores, the global sociopolitical breakdown currently happening in favor of far right fascists funded by billionaires, and everything that comes with that.
I feel we are past the point of no return and am confident that I will probably die before the absolute worst of it, but my generation’s children would not. I have never been more afraid for children in my life, and there are many in my own little village. I just do not and cannot foresee a future where this gets better, with as powerless as we are against surveillance and military technology. As nihilistic as it sounds, we are speedrunning extinction and the guard rails are gone. I do not want to see children suffer for it, and especially not my own.
If you truly believed that everything can only get worse from here I don't know why you're still here, frankly.
Edit: I'll elaborate. You will die before the worst of it. We all will. I went to school for ecology, I know how grim things are. Worsening climate crises are going to push desperate people out of increasingly hot and arid regions into places with more fresh water and that will cause terrible conflicts. We're driving a mass extinction event that's making the leaderboards. (I don't think we're hitting K-T numbers without nuclear war but it's gonna be bad.)
But we also, as a species, bounced back from a 98% population loss that lasted a hundred thousand years. And that was Stone Age technology. I have the utmost faith in our adaptability and I'm pretty confident humanity will survive our own bullshit. Further, I don't think morality enters into it. Life is amoral. Existence is amoral. The ability to contemplate the nature of existence does not elevate us above that amorality. So I'm not throwing in the towel.
Whew that’s a windy way to tell me to kill myself huh, and to your elaboration: someone else’s kids can get knocked back to the Stone Age to repopulate the earth if we’re as like cockroaches as you believe. Not mine though.
No like why are you here, why bother with society if it's doomed and miserable? Why make connections that will amount to nothing? Why not live as a hermit or descend into unbridled hedonism?
You mean why am I here if I’m not going to shit out babies and force them into an impossible situation? Why are you here asking fucking moronic questions when the community is labeled childfree? We all make choices
The community could be a place for people to find validation for choosing not to have children in a culture that's still largely hetero-normative and pressures young people to get married and have kids. It could even be a place for DINKs to jerk each other off about the cool shit they have money for instead of children. It sucks that it's mostly full of doomer anti-natalists and soft-genocide ecofascists. Y'all need therapy and antidepressants.
Have you considered that DINK and non traditional families also have multiple motivations and are multi-faceted individuals? I would never condemn anyone for having children but I am sad for children being given a bad life they didn’t choose by parents who knew better. I’m more of the mind that should I want children, I will probably end up adopting or fostering one day, but I am not compelled to breed or to spread some bloodline legacy when there are more than enough unloved and suffering children in the world — but even then I have qualms with the ethical implications of a society that takes children from poor families it refuses to provide for and pays others to raise (however poorly) those same kids whose mothers were deemed undeserving of that same social welfare.
You call me a doomer and anti-natalist, but you agree with how shitty everything is so what’s the issue? That I’m realistic about it and not relentlessly optimistic that life will find a way so I should just cheer up about it? Is it anti-natalist to believe we have a resources and population issue and that declining birth rates, however bad for an economy, can only be a longer term boon for the sum total of our species’ destructive capability? I don’t hate children, but I don’t feel qualified to make a better world for them and that grieves me. People are supposed to want their children to prosper, to live a better life, and if I can’t imagine that possibility, my personal ethos is that I shouldn’t create a living being that gets to watch what’s coming play out.
I am depressed. It’s depressing. Everyone is depressed. Therapy only does so much, but my problems are only internal insofar as I choose to look at the world without blinding myself to very real problems. Sure, I could chipper up if I choose to be ignorant and delusional about everything, but that’s not who I am and never has been. Whatever soft-genocide or economically-driven eugenics you think I support because I am fearful for the poor and what their children will suffer, since they will always suffer the most, I can tell you that I would rather these marginalized groups had access to thorough sex education and safe birth control options because historically it has only helped those communities, both economically and socially. If you disagree with that despite factual evidence in cases like quantifiable improvements in marginalized communities a generation after Roe v Wade was decided, then you ignore reality to create an enemy that doesn’t exist, while trivializing real issues.
It's not someone else's responsibility to provide a reason for you to fight / live, care for you when you're old, or help you change things you don't like. None of those things benefits the kid being born.
Having kids is morally wrong.
It's called society, the thing we all live in that only works because of collective will and effort.
Giving up now is worse for them.
Morality has nothing to do with it. Not a single atom in the universe consented to its own existence.
I feel like I just need to reflect on this for a while to figure out where everyone else is coming from. I really wish I could understand people who think this way. I'm the one with the unpopular opinion and I'm just amazed. Pretty sure most people in my town would be offended if they knew what I thought about having kids.