Antinatalism has a point but it upsets me

[sakura184]

So I've been involved in feminism for many years.
I got involved in quite a radical group and as time went on I learned about antinatalism.

These radical women very much despise mothers and it didn't feel any different to the run of the mill patriarchal undermining and despising of mothers.

But they do have a point. They say we shouldn't have had babies at late stage patriarchy because we can't protect our children, the environment is polluted beyond all repair, that women have lost their access to clean and plentiful food and water. We have given birth under inhumane conditions and for this we should experience a deep guilt. One said "I can't imagine being able to live with myself after doing something so heinous".

Anyway i find it upsetting and was just hoping for maybe some sort of support thread or something. I've given birth twice and only now I do see that the antinatalist feminists have a point but obviously it's too late for me to change what I've done. They think women who gave birth are either stupid or evil beyond compare

How to carry on, in regard to what kind of future our children have. I wish we didn't live under patriarchy, and could raise our children safely and happily.

The antinatalsits would probably say this is a horrible, self indulgent thread. That mothers just should suck it up and live with the guilt, but I can honestly say I had no idea how bad things were when I decided to have children and I think most mothers are like me.

I find it difficult to envisage a form of feminism that despises mothers and aims to make women feel guilty for exercising reproductive choice.

As soon as women in the third world have reproductive choice they have far fewer children. It's very unhealthy for women to reproduce many times. It's the same as cats. But people who live in societies where there's high infant mortality and no provision for old age feel driven to have large families.

You reduce the number of babies being born by providing healthcare, both for mothers and children.

Human beings have a strong drive to reproduce, like all other animals. Feminism's job is to look at the harm done to women by the many factors - social, economic, physical - involved in maternity.

I worked in publishing, in a very female friendly area. I thought feminism had achieved most of its aims. Then I had a baby.

It pretty much destroyed my career. While I was on maternity leave my trainee was promoted to be my manager. When I returned I was cut out of communications and was treated as baby brained and no longer a serious player.

My union told me to hang on as long as I could but when I was eventually forced into resigning they funded an industrial tribunal for me. The tribunal agreed that I had suffered sexual discrimination and their ruling expressed very strong disapproval of my employer but I lost on a technicality. They ruled that had I walked out as soon as I found out about my new working conditions I would have won my case. By hanging on I essentially agreed to work under those conditions.

Mothers, imo, need feminism more than many other women. Calling women "breeders" is plain misogyny.

Sorry to hear that Prawn - utterly shitty.

But they do have a point
No they don't- or rather any point they might have had on environmental issues is lost in the extremism of their language.

They say we shouldn't have had babies at late stage patriarchy because we can't protect our children, the environment is polluted beyond all repair, that women have lost their access to clean and plentiful food and water. We have given birth under inhumane conditions and for this we should experience a deep guilt. One said "I can't imagine being able to live with myself after doing something so heinous"

And how many people do you think will read that and agree?

Groups like this are dangerous. Their language is so extreme it is far more likely to damage environmental causes. They won't be taken seriously and their existence gives succour to those who oppose mainstream environmental protection groups.

I am a feminist who has chosen not to have children because of the environmental crisis. I don't despise women who have made that choice at all. I generally avoid topics like population with friends who have more than 2 kids, because I realise we are never going to see eye-to-eye on it without even 'going there'. I made the choice I felt was right, which is the best I can do. Who am I to judge anyone else?

Op none of that sounds like feminism and if they're saying it is I imagine this would make most feminists uncomfortable. It's gaslighting.
'These radical women very much despise mothers and it didn't feel any different to the run of the mill patriarchal undermining and despising of mothers.' Not feminism.
'We have given birth under inhumane conditions and for this we should experience a deep guilt.' Not feminism.
'They think women who gave birth are either stupid or evil beyond compare' Er, or maybe all women are subject to sex-based oppression and many are sexually abused and denied education and reproductive rights.
'The antinatalsits would probably say this is a horrible, self indulgent thread. That mothers just should suck it up and live with the guilt' Not feminism.
Maybe they'd like to take their argument to men and start by advocating universal male sterilisation - ? Let's see how that goes.

The woman I admired the most for her feminist writing very much puts the blame at the feet of mothers but I did notice that she's a white american lawyer, somebody who chose a career over having a family and then realized at the age of 40 or whatever that having kids was a really bad thing to do under patriarchy.
She's right that it's a bad thing to do but other women don't have even the promise of a career and for them there was nothing else out there "instead" of having children.

Also another thing I did notice from the antinatalist feminists is that they never desired or wanted children anyway and think birth is gross etc

See for a long time I thought women who opted not to have kids for political reasons were "taking one for the team", putting aside their desire to have a baby for the greater good. But turns out they weren't all along. They didn't want kids anyway. So it's different asking women who do want kids to not have them for the sake of politics.
I still think the antinatalist feminists are right, and I wish I'd known enough to make a better informed decision, but I don't think mothers deserve the bile from women who wouldn't have had kids even if the conditions were perfect.

Personally I've never seen a woman give birth. I had homebirths because I didn't want any man seeing my vagina stretch like it did. I think seeing birth on tv is a type of pornography that I don't agree with. I think it's hugely disrespectful to women to make this public viewing. I think knowledge about birth should be passed to women via books or word of mouth. So it struck me that this particular feminist had watched women give birth out of a morbid curiosity or to get inevitably grossed out by it.

How is this a type of feminism if it’s entirely blaming women for having children? I mean they do realise there are two parties involved right?

Aside from the complete stupidity of the rest of it of course, that bit particularly stood out to me.

Erm, don’t you need men to have children? Do these people also tell men that they shouldn’t have children?

MoltenLasagne

I know I didn't get that bit either. If it's anyone's fault it's men's, considering how they've been obsessed with controlling our reproductive rights, laws which made rape in marriage legal etc.

The feminists in question do know that patriarchy is the reason the world is overpopulated but I guess they think women should've committed suicide rather than go through with having a baby they didn't really want.

I don't know why I had babies really. I never had maternal instincts in the sense that seeing babies made me coo. I also heard lots about the biological clock and women regretting leaving it too late so I thought I'd better have them in my early twenties so this didn't happen. The pain of infertility seemed unbearable and I know women do weird things like hire surrogates because they're apparently so desperate to have a baby.

Essentially I had babies because I thought it would be a nice thing to do. And it was! It was the best kept secret and you can't "know" until you do it.
But I do feel the guilt that I'm supposed to and I may hold my hands up at stupidity but I draw the line at evil.

BUT anyway, having fewer children will not automatically solve the problem. The problem is number of people * footprint per person.

Footprint per person varies widely around the world and it is quite possible for footprint per person to go up if people have no or smaller families. For example, instead of having a family you may have a high flying career with lots of foreign holidays.

We need to solve the fundamentals and short of mass extinction of humans we need to Sort out the uk transport system, sort out the uk electricity generation , fix agriculture, fix capitalism.

This is why people are saying that governments have to step up. The pr8mary reason for people to take individual action is to pressurise the government.

Without government action we as individuals can not do enough. We have a few years. Stopping all births world wide now will not solve the proble in time

OP I essentially agree with you but having guilt about this is a bit silly and self indulgent. It's pointless and untrue to say that you wouldn't have children now if you knew what you knew. You still would.

Essentially I had babies because I thought it would be a nice thing to do. And it was!

Thats why every one has children. You have trod the exact same path every parent has. 1. "I really want children"

1. Has children
2. "Why on earth did I have all these children?"
3. "Oh but I wouldn't be without them"

There was a thread on here not long ago where someone was saying that they wouldn't have had children if they knew about climate change. Their children were in primary school! As if climate change has only started in the last 5-7 years.

It's true in my experience that most of the people who talk that way didn't in fact want kids, and often they don't like them, and they resent having any obligation to other people's kids. For example, paying taxes for family benefits or having someone at work who always leaves on time to pick up their children from school.

Fundamentally they are selfish and they are radical individualists who don't understand how dependent we all are on each other. I often think they should be allowed to opt out of helping and then when they age, they only are allowed to receive benefits that they accrued themselves. No social benefits from taxes of younger people, no investment income from industries making money from selling to younger people, no younger nurses or cleaners in their care home to look out for them.

They are also often the people who take the "I didn't ask to be born into this terrible world, poor me so put upon just because my parents were selfish as to have kids" line. Which you do not, in my experience, hear often from people who come from places where they really are barriers to their survival.

These people have always existed. The problem is they used to go round with sandwich boards and shout about it. Now with the internet they can group together and spread their hate far and wide. I am very conflicted about having children but blaming women and talking about them in such disparaging terms is never going to be the solution. We need more respect for each other.

I advised my daughter not to get married and have children. But let's be honest this childfree path has always been a class privilege for women. Spinsters were upper class or upper middle class women.
Then again working class lesbians have always existed and managed to navigate the world childless , although on the other hand many lesbians have been forced to marry and have children over the centuries. Ugh

Not RTFT but interested to know more about how this rhetoric would work. How do antinatalists legislate for women who are subject to rape and/or forced birth, women who don’t believe in contraception, or who don’t believe in abortion, or women who have no access to either of these things, or women who just want to have a baby because they have a strong reproductive urge?

It’s not really a sufficient argument to say that people ‘shouldn’t have children’ and leave it at that. What if they do? (Which they will obviously) What happens then?

I'm not sure why anyone is bothering to take them seriously.

They are flat- earthers/anti- vaxxers/ the world was created in 6 dayers. Does sticking "feminist" in front of those groups make their theories any more credible?

Where they are dangerous is it allows the Trumps of this world to lump serious and credible environmentalists in with this bunch. Why should Trump believe any environmentalist when this sort of nonsense is peddled.

No they are feminists, I've followed their logic and they have reached the logical conclusion based on the evidence in front of them.

The issue for me is this : we are told that the biological ticking clock is a real phenomenon. I certainly believed it and had kids before it was too late but I'm wondering whether this is wholly real or just part of patriarchal propaganda. I did used to read a lot of women's magazines though like Take a Break and it seemed to me that this was a plausible and real thing. Which tells me that the desire to reproduce might really be some kind of primal instinct, I don't know. I'm certain it is in men, who need a carrier for their Y. I think it upsets the antinatalist feminists that women might also have a primal instinct to reproduce because we are essentially reproducing patriarchy with each generation.

I'm not sure what point there is speculating about the supposed beliefs of a group of which no-one here is a part and who as far as I can tell aren't making their message (if their message is being represented even vaguely accurately here) heard particularly effectively, despite it being the age of the internet.

I'm not sure why anyone is bothering to take them seriously.

They are flat- earthers/anti- vaxxers/ the world was created in 6 dayers. Does sticking "feminist" in front of those groups make their theories any more credible?

Quite. A group I do find interesting are those feminists who are opposed to women becoming married/mothers as standard, mostly for the benefit of the individual women themselves and their ability to resist patriarchy. It is obvious how this group is feminist in nature. The group being discussed by the OP, not so much.

I'm still failing to see why you are taking them seriously.

I never read women's magazines except my mother's Cosmo but never bought it after I left home at 18 so can't comment on what influences or insights Take a Break might bring to the subject- possibly it was more rational than the antinatalists.

I don't find the idea that humans have a primal urge to procreate a particularly surprising one.

I see you don't address that their twaddle is potentially dangerous to mainstream environmentalists? It's difficult enough to get climate change taken seriously by Trump et al^ without muddying the issue by this sort of impractical nonsense.

I think it's a bit of a derail to argue whether the women are feminists. They are and have some standing in feminist circles

Antinatalism is the ultimate form of misanthropy. Humans are too shitty to live, just let them die off.

If we need fewer people to exist you should list who to get rid of and how to dispose of them, or who to sterilise. I’ve got a feeling people like me would inevitably find themselves on such a list, just as they have previously.

AlwaysComingHome

That's a good point isn't it. Patriarchy has enforced sterility on certain groups of women. Jewish women were made sterile by the experiments. The Japanese government has recently apologized to the women it enforced hysterectomies on when they were 16 because they had had mental health issues as teens. More cases of eugenics and enforced sterility. China imposes unwanted late term abortions on women.

I don't think it's as cut and dried as to say that it's always a patriarchal prerogative to force women to reproduce. I think female suffering is a currency under patriarchy though. In an interview one of the Japanese women I talked about above said her unwanted hysterectomy and subsequent inability to have children ruined her life.

I have two sisters and two cousins, adult human females, each and every one who never had an urge to procreate. I have a SIL who felt that she didn't have the urge either. She had two sons and still thinks that it was society that pressurised her into having children. She loves her boys.

Personally, if I had the chance to do it all again? I wouldn't have children. I love my three children.