Born This Way At All?: An Antinatalist Declaration

It's hard to describe oneself as an antinatalist without the uninitiated mistaking you for a baby murderer. Yes, I hate children, particularly the squealing, shrieking kind, but that's entirely a different matter (and in fairness, I don't exactly dislike babies: who could hate such cute, soft, bouncy little bundles of joy, save when they poop). I myself find the term "antinatalism" particularly inadequate to describe the philosophy it represents, when I discovered the term roughly a year ago which turned out to be the near-sacred personal world view I happen to believe in all this time. It's not so much as simply not wanting children to be born, for whatever reason, be it related to economics or overpopulation. It's about the question of existence itself. It's about questioning if all the possible joys and pleasures of life are really worth all the challenges, the disappointents, the imperfections and suffering that comes with it. If it's even fair at all to be "forced" into "existence", without ever having been given a choice. It's about pointing a blaming finger on the unchangeable, the inevitable.

Religious people would have a simple response: it's all according to "God's" will. "God" created you for a reason. "God" wants you to apreciate his creation, and to realize your true purpose. "God" wants you to worship him and glorify him as your "creator". If I were to honestly look into this kind of thinking, I can find no other conclusion: "God" wants you to be his toy. A toy that, unfortunately, could feel. A toy who could make mistakes, and be done mistakes to. A toy who would writhe in eternal suffering in Hell or be reincarnated as a slimy worm should you happen to annoy your creator by not flattering his ego with "prayers", or should you happen to dislike his "perfect divine plan". You may as well have not been created at all, but of course you can't have a say on that. "God" can do whatever he wants!

I thus find an atheist view of the antinatist philosophy less hateful. For some reason or another, there was the Big Bang, and with it the chain of events that led to atoms, the Universe, to DNA, and to then to life, all governed by their respective natural laws. "Pain" has become an evolutionary-sound means for living things to respond to stimuli and keep "living", and is here to stay. And out of this natural process, you "became". Nothing could have stopped it, just as milk can't be stopped from spilling once the glass is dropped. It's Nature running its own course.

Thinking about it, perhaps antinatalism is indeed the only sound term to legitimize it for public discourse. What's the point, after all, of crafting your thoughts on what no one can do anything about? It's too late for you to be "unborn", but you can keep other people from ever "becoming" at all. Simply by never bringing a child into the world--"anti" and "natalism". Whether it be by celibacy or abortion is an entirely different subject altogether, and debates regarding this are what keeps antinatalism, though relatively unheard of by many, a living philosophy.

What's of those who already live to do then? It's none of anyone's business. "Pain" - or what I would rather call, "Disturbance" - is something only the person himself knows. No one else but oneself knows how one really feels. We may laugh at a lethargic obese lady utterly distressed by an out-of-service escalator, but an antinatalist would say who are we to judge how the lady feels just because the rest of us could "suck it up" and climb the stairs instead? The point is that how we perceive and respond to life, to all its perks and, more importantly, its disturbances, is ours and ours alone, and no one has the right to judge that a child who lives in constant hunger and dread in warn-torn Afghanistan "suffers" more than a well-fed First World kid who whines for not being given a PS3 for his birthday. One could face life's pains head on if one wishes to, but if one were to choose to end it all and take his or her own life for it, after weighing all options one has at hand, then nobody, NOBODY, not even the "loved ones" who'd be left behind in grief, has any right to condemn it.

"Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved."
-Mark Twain