I Wanted To Know If Having A Kid On A Burning Planet Was Right - I Found That Antinatalism Is Seriously Taboo
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Well, I was about to turn 30, and I’m someone who tries to do the right thing. I wanted to know if having a kid, on this burning planet, was the right thing. In 2021, Ipsos released their Perils of Perception: Climate Change paper in which they declared that the single most effective things a person from a rich country (like mine) could do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions was: have one less child. It is fair to criticise the very idea of an individual carbon footprint. After all, it was a genius piece of PR propaganda created by BP to shift focus away from the 100 companies that emit 71% of climate-damaging carbon dioxide emissions worldwide. But in Australia, Scott Morrison won the 2019 election after he’d brought a lump of coal into parliament in 2017. I couldn’t see much cause for optimism about systemic change.
I started looking for a new way to ask that foundational, Socratic question: what is a good life? How can I lead it? And should I try to create it? Is it even possible to? What I didn’t expect to find in antinatalism was a complex and rich web of ideas, some contradictory and some complementary, but all based on compassion. Most antinatalists I’ve spoken to and whose work I’ve read share the underlying desire to reduce suffering. To minimise harm and hurt. All human life involves suffering, and all humans cause suffering. You may believe that suffering is outweighed by the joys and experiences of life. You may believe that humans are entitled to kill animals to eat or burn the Earth for profit. Those are normal beliefs. But they aren’t universal. There are as many ways to be an antinatalist as there are to be, say, a Christian or a Buddhist or a romantic or a Stoic. But the core belief they share is that for those of us who can choose, the better choice is to not create another human being.
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Our society has come a long way in making space for things such as maternal ambivalence and the childfree movement, but those are still frameworks that ask whether or not we want to have children, not whether or not we should. I’ve learned that, for many people, these ideas are inherently offensive. It’s one of the reasons I was cautious to make sure the protagonist in my book was a man. Ie: not me. Like all taboo topics, the fast track to shutting down a conversation you don’t want to have is to shame the speaker.
What’s so strange about antinatalism being taboo is that pronatalism is skyrocketing in mainstream prevalence. And whereas antinatalists seek only to convince, pronatalists seek to legislate. People like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and JD Vance want to “make America procreate again”. In late January, a Department of Transportation memo directed the agency to prioritise projects that “give preference to communities with marriage and birthrates higher than the national average”. In April the USAID program cut off their supply of contraceptives to 50 million women, and in July a story came out that they’d ordered a $9.7m supply of birth control to be incinerated.
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https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/sep/28/should-we-have-children-burning-planet-author-bri-lee-seed-book-antinatalism-seriously-taboo