The anti-natalist movement, which calls for humans to stop having children, involves many secular people and can be seen as a reaction to recent technologies of birth that have given humans greater control over matters of life and death, writes Jack Jiang in Anthropology Today (November/December). While anti-natalism is not a new movement or philosophy, it has been strengthened and globalized with the growth of secularism, concerns with climate change, and legal activism. Some anti-natalist activists have even brought “wrongful life” suits against their parents. The movement is particularly strong in Japan, which has already one of the lowest birthrates in the world. Japanese anti-natalists have adopted the metaphor of the “gacha”—a toy vending machine based on chance and gambling—to describe how chance dictates the circumstances of one’s birth. As one anti-natalist describes it, “This endless circle of death and reproduction—it doesn’t serve any purpose. There’s no divine reason for it.”
Some anti-natalists use the term “small gods” to describe the heightened responsibility attributed to parents “within a secular framework that views birth as a choice rather than predetermined event. This concept contrasts with traditional spiritual beliefs that often frame procreation as a divine act or a fulfillment of destiny,” Jiang writes. Unexpectedly, many anti-natalist activists, like their religious counterparts, oppose such technologies as IVF (with the Reddit group for female anti-natalists forbidding all pro-surrogacy content), genetic editing, and screening, believing that, like contraception and abortion, they extend control to parents at the expense of the unborn who have no choice to be born in the first place. Jiang concludes that secularism still “allows room for relations with the non-existent. Just as the living owe something to the departed, the unborn are becoming part of the moral universe.”
(Anthropology Today, https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/14678322)
