By: Gwyn Solomon
Are you a broke college student in need of extra cash?
Did you consent to be born?
If you didn’t, consider suing your parents for giving birth to you without your consent like Raphael Samuel did in his anti-natalist publicity stunt. When interviewed about his lawsuit, Samuel told BBC reporters: “I was a normal kid. One day I was very frustrated and I didn’t want to go to school but my parents kept asking me to go. So I asked them: ‘Why did you have me?’ And my dad had no answer. I think if he’d been able to answer, maybe I wouldn’t have thought this way.”
Raphael Samuel isn’t the only person to feel this way. Anti-natalist thinking has been around for centuries and has only grown as overpopulation spikes, quality of life drops, and concern about the environment rises. Anti-natalism isn’t the only rapidly rising ideology being adopted in response to climate change: veganism is on the rise as well. However, while both lifestyles have the potential to change the world for the better, and concerns about climate change are often cited to justify the choice, veganism and anti-natalism have wildly different roots and an array of motivations.
Anti-natalist sentiments have been around since the early days of Buddhism and stretched throughout history, through continents and religions. However, the term “anti-natalism” wasn’t associated with these ideas until David Benatar’s 2006 book Better Never to Have Been. Benatar argues that there is an asymmetry between pain (harms) and pleasure (benefits), asserting that “the absence of pain is good, even if that good is not enjoyed by anyone, whereas the absence of pleasure is not bad unless there is somebody for whom this absence is a deprivation.” Anti-natalism, generally, tends to be divided into two main factions. One faction is philosophical anti-natalism: the belief that creating new life at all is immoral and that humans should collectively stop having children and slowly die out. The other, less extreme faction is reactionary/activist anti-natalism. This faction aligns more with environmental concerns. It takes the stance that having children in a world ripe with war, starvation, and overpopulation is something that should be limited.
Veganism, as a lifestyle and ideology, also tends to have two factions: protectionism and abolitionism. While abolitionist vegans, similar to philosophical anti-natalists, believe that humans have no right to use or kill animals, protectionist vegans work more towards limiting animal product use. Similarly to reactionary anti-natalists, protectionist vegans can set aside the “end-goal” ideals of their philosophy to confront a real-world problem and set compromises, particularly in environmental concerns. These vegans still work to challenge the morality of eating or using animal products, but, like anti-natalism, religious and spiritual factors are at work. One motivator of many vegans that isn’t as much a factor for anti-natalists is the appeal of the diet for health reasons. However, when asked to defend their choice or to convince someone of their beliefs, both vegans and anti-natalists often turn to environmental concerns.
For anti-natalists, the main concern regarding the environment is overpopulation. For vegans, it’s the unsustainable nature of meat production. But while around 40% of young vegans agree that veganism is good for the environment, closer to 17% said that that’s the reason they made their choice. For both vegans and anti-natalists, the benefit to the environment is more a happy accident than anything—but that benefit can never happen without collective action. Though the moral, religious, or health reasons behind both veganism and anti-natalism can be upheld at the individual level, individual choices will not substantially affect the world.
While these philosophies rely on majority support, both are held in the minority: vegans represent approximately 1.1% of the global population, while anti-natalists are estimated to represent less than half of that number, at around 0.5%. Of course, it isn’t really possible to know how many people subscribe to these beliefs, and even harder to know who practices what they preach. But it’s sufficient to know that both lifestyles reside in the overwhelming minority.
For both, the opposite view is the one viewed as correct or “moral” by default: eating animal products and having babies. The interesting difference here isn’t that the majority view is viewed as moral—it’s that judgment is often passed onto the choice to not do something. Oftentimes, people have to defend why they don’t have kids or don’t eat meat. There is even a non-conformist stereotype associated with vegans and anti-natalists, and a general disdain for those who preach the practices, leading to nicknames such as “Baby-Hater” or “Tree-Hugger.” The view that a lack of action can be considered an incorrect or immoral lifestyle is an interesting contrast to what is usually considered “immoral action” and raises questions about what role veganism and anti-natalism realistically play in modern society.
