First of all, being child-free, my initial reaction to Stop Having Kids (SHK) was laughter. Surely, this must be some new parody account on X. After digging a bit deeper, it appears that this organization, which promotes "anti-natalism," has not only been around for a while, but is an actual thing.
Despite a recent rise in popularity of anti-natalism in internet spaces, Stop Having Kids is one of very few organizations of its kind. The organization began in March of 2021 when the founder, who goes by the name of Dietz, sought to create a mask with a provocative message stitched on in hope of sparking conversation. He chose to create a mask that said “Stop Having Kids” and was overwhelmed by the positive reactions he received wearing it. From there, the organization grew into a website and hosted regular outreach demonstrations, under the mission “To Normalize Antinatalism, Childfreedom, & Caring For Already Existing Life.”
The Stop Having Kids Website lists a plethora of reasons why they view procreation as immoral, including “Birth Defects,” “Eternal Dissatisfaction” and “Existing Life In Need of Help.” Alex, a volunteer and organizer at SHK who coordinates demonstrations and helps run their social media page, explains that she is an anti-natalist because anti-natalism offers a solution to all of the issues she cares about. “I would like to reduce as much suffering in the world as possible and one of the easiest ways to do that is by not bringing another person into the world who would have to endure a lifetime of existence, which can never be guaranteed to be positive…anti-natalism definitely is one of the best ways to reduce suffering on all fronts.”
When did life hold any guarantees? Who judges what is positive? According to Dietz and Alex, everyone from children with Down syndrome to a child born to a low-income family will not have a positive outcome. Another publication goes a bit more in-depth about how Alex and Dietz (who conceal their real names) formed their interesting organization.
In the summertime, Alex and Dietz decided to take a road trip. The two had met years earlier on Instagram, as fellow animal-rights activists, and had discovered that they agreed on much more than veganism. Actually they agreed on basically everything, including that new human life is not a gift but a needless perpetuation of suffering. Babies grow up to be adults, and adulthood contains loneliness, rejection, drudgery, hopelessness, regret, grief, and terror. Even grade school contains that much. Why put someone through that, Alex and Dietz agreed, when a child could just as well never have known existence at all? The unborn do not appear to be moaning at us from the void, petitioning to be let into life. This idea—that having children is unethical—has come to be known as antinatalism, and in 2021 Dietz set up an Instagram account for a new organization he called Stop Having Kids. By then, the two were dating, although most of the time still living apart. Every so often, they met to hold demonstrations for Stop Having Kids, which Dietz has over time built into a real operation with donors who fund billboards that say things like PROCREATION IS NOT A RESPONSIBILITY and MAKE LOVE NOT BABIES.
Before entering this insanely cruel, unjust, and bizarre world none of us had an interest, desire, or any form of consent to come into it. Forcing someone into the world isn’t caring, selfless, kind, and it certainly isn’t a personal choice or doing someone a favor. pic.twitter.com/pbnT8Lbf4s
— Stop Having Kids (@SHK_Movement) April 5, 2024
"Making love" is what leads to making babies. My pastor has five children (now adults), and people would express to him that he must love kids. He said, no, I love my wife, so therefore, we have five kids! Despite our biologically ignorant society and IVF's allowance for designer babies produced in laboratories, God intended for sexual intercourse to be the way we further the human race, and it's still the case 95 percent of the time. We were created to reproduce, and the very act of intercourse is a pleasurable one for that very reason — so that we keep doing it. Two of the most beautiful people (inside and out) I know are Roxanne and Bob Hoge. You know Bob because he graces us with his writing and editing skills here at RedState. Roxanne birthed four children (two at once), and those children (now young adults) are also straight out of central casting. As one of my friends used to say of biracial children, "Nature apparently approves." I asked Roxanne why she and Bob chose to procreate — and why so many?
We had four children because we're really good at making beautiful people. We had a boy, and then a girl, and then the best surprise ever—Twins!
There is great pleasure in creativity, and having and raising a child requires creativity in spades. But it's not just pleasurable to the parents, but grandparents as well: I know very few grandparents who are not over the moon about their grandchildren. But as a crazy aunt and great aunt, I also derive pleasure from being a part of the lives of my nephews, nieces, and grand nephews and nieces.
Bob, on the other hand, was very much like my pastor: He loved Roxanne and liked making kids with Roxanne! His original plan in life was to be that urbane bachelor a la the series "Mad Men." Marriage and kids weren't on the radar. Roxanne is a force of nature, so I can totally see how Bob was transformed.
Very soon after we got married, I said to my new wife as if the idea had just occurred to me, 'We should have kids.' It sounds crazy, but I hadn't really given it that much thought—it was more of an instinct, something from deep within me that I hadn't even really known existed.
For me, it was more of a spiritual thing from my soul rather than an intellectual decision made after much thought. It turned out to be the most fortuitous awakening in my life, as having children has been the richest experience I have ever known and my four babies are the world to me. Of course, they're no longer actual babies, but they'll always be our babies. What I learned is that sometimes your deeper soul knows much more about the meaning of life than your intellectual musings. If I had followed what I thought I wanted instead of what something more powerful than myself told me, my life would be far emptier than it is today.
Bottom line: Even with the dysfunction that surrounds the life of some families, the family unit does infinitely more good than harm for our society, and adds a powerful element to our world, not just in furthering the human race, but in infusing life, energy, and creative chaos into an otherwise static world. It's also the cure for loneliness. This very much explains why these anti-natalists and most Leftists are so miserable. There is no satisfaction in being restrictive or destroying what someone else has built. But when you participate in building a life, or several lives, you create something greater than yourself that makes a larger impact on the world.
A Millennial mom of three boys had this to say about the supposed selfishness of procreation.
There's nothing about parenting (done God's way) that is selfish. Done God's way, it is continually choosing to be selfless over and over again, every day. I fail at this often, but I run the race and make it my goal.
Now, that part about responsible procreation? Well, that's something that very few people, outside of religious circles, are advocating for. If what SHK means is keeping the pants zipped and legs closed, using contraception properly, and should you become pregnant and feel unready, seek help or put that child up for adoption, then I can agree on that. But I am quite sure that's not what SHK advocates. Instead, they cherry-pick the Bible (as per usez with this bunch) and philosophers to claim their view is supported:
In The Childfree Christ, published in 2021, the Belgian antinatalist Théophile de Giraud argues that the Bible is an antinatalist text, a view emphatically held by Kierkegaard, who found it obvious that the Bible instructs the Christlike not to have kids. Jesus gave his followers lots of examples of how to be good in the world, but one thing he did not do was start a nuclear family. Instead, he collected a spiritual family, like that replicated in nunneries and monasteries. Some Christian sects—most famously, the Cathars, who were sentenced to death by Pope Innocent III in the thirteenth century—later found cause to conclude that the Christly thing to do was not to procreate. “Better than both is the one who has never been born, who has not seen the evil that is done under the sun,” writes the author of Ecclesiastes.
Jesus didn't create a nuclear family because that wasn't what he was born for or called to do. He knew his purpose, and it wasn't to create a spiritual family either <insert *eyeroll* emoji>. What I find fascinating is they totally bypass that command at the front of the book. God told Adam and Eve in Genesis to be Fruitful. To Multiply.
As Bob had his spiritual moment of awakening to a greater calling of marriage and children in adulthood, the Millennial mom of three boys knew from the time she was a little girl that she was called to be a mom. As she grew older, she more accurately understood the greater purpose beyond simply conceiving and bearing children.
We are created to recreate, to multiply. So while the biological desire has been there from the time before I got my first baby doll, as I got older, I also understood that there's a larger calling on my life to have children. To be fruitful and to multiply. To pass down my faith to my children and by doing so being about the business of the Kingdom of God.
People also ignore the last part of that command: to Replenish the Earth. Replenish denotes a continual process that is meant to occur again and again. God didn't put in a codicil about whether the planet can sustain us. He just instructed us to keep populating the earth with humans. If man and woman fail to keep up that process, then there will be no replenishment, no fruitfulness, no multiplication. No humans.
Which would make some people like Klaus Schwab and the eugenicist bunch that descend on Davos once a year to plot out how to destroy our lives quite happy. Alex and Dietz seem to subscribe to this philosophy. We are not individuals with a unique will, a focused purpose, or agency, therefore why should we be choosing to have children? The very scary Yuval Noah Harari furthers this concept that human beings are pawns to be controlled.
But soon at least some corporations and governments will be able to systematically hack all the people. We humans should get used to the idea that we are no longer mysterious souls – we are now hackable animals. That's what we are.
You see if we have no agency, then we have no right to bring life into the world; especially when we cannot guarantee outcomes. It is Marxist philosophy to its core that denies freedom of choice, and denies our power and potential to create a better world than the one in front of us through the simple, yet complicated, act of bringing new life into the world.
Imagine misunderstanding human nature and the human experience so badly that you are against procreation.
— Chart Westcott (@ChartWestcott) April 6, 2024
The whole point is to pass the baton. Not for yourself. Not for your kids. For humanity.
Yes, the world is cruel, unjust, and bizarre. We endure it anyway, for each… https://t.co/VNpquV0XyF
Imagine misunderstanding human nature and the human experience so badly that you are against procreation. The whole point is to pass the baton. Not for yourself. Not for your kids. For humanity. Yes, the world is cruel, unjust, and bizarre. We endure it anyway, for each other and what @elonmusk calls “the light of consciousness”.
As a child-free woman, I wish I could understand that joy of bringing life into the world and teaching them how to navigate it and make it a better place. My plans were to meet my husband, procreate, and raise children. As life would have it, my husband did not arrive in my life until I was into my 40s, and lots of life and physical issues preempted our ability to do that. So, really, SHK is a slap in the face to me and others who innately wished to bear children, but because life holds no guarantees, we could not. So we pour that nurture into other creative pursuits, whether it is being a crazy auntie, mentoring, fostering, or adopting.
The moral imperative should be to prioritize the overabundance of life that already exists and is in need of major life improvement over the unborn who lack need or desire to exist. Many humans are so careless about focusing on existing life that they ask if this is a joke. pic.twitter.com/5CWaOOdPkD
— Stop Having Kids (@SHK_Movement) April 7, 2024
It is also a slap in the face to the people, agencies, foster mothers and fathers, and so many other humans who are doing all they can to make a difference in this world. These human saints are too busy doing the actual work of helping the "overabundance of life that already exists" that they don't have time to march and pontificate on others' choices.
