This information is being reported at a couple of international sites, but (if accurate) it has apparently been blacked out in the U.S.
The bomber at a fertility clinic in Palm Springs, California, has been identified as a 25-year-old man who left an online manifesto in which he described himself as a pro-mortalist, saying people didn’t give consent to exist.
The suspect is Guy Edward Bartkus, a 25-year-old man from Twentynine Palms, a small city about 35 miles northeast of Palm Springs. He left a 30-minute audio recording in which he explained his motive for the attack.
“I figured I would just make a recording explaining why I’ve decided to bomb an IVF building, or clinic,” he said at the beginning of the recording. “Basically, it just comes down to I’m angry that I exist and that, you know, nobody got my consent to bring me here.”
Describing himself as anti-life, he adds: “I’m very against [IVF], it’s extremely wrong. These are people who are having kids after they’ve sat there and thought about it. How much more stupid can it get?”
Nothing wrong with not choosing to have kids or whatever, but yeah, this is really taking that ideology to a ridiculous extreme.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinatalism
Antinatalists are beyond people who decided to not have kids.
It’s a respectable philosophical position with serious arguments. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with advocating it. Bombing for the cause is a different matter.
It’s more like the real problem here is extremism. Taking any belief to an absolutist and extreme degree is a problem. This also includes values and positions that are considered mainstream.
Not really. This is the same pants-on-head level reasoning that leads people to oppose medical procedures on animals or even suggest that we should kill them to avoid suffering merely because they can’t consent to anything. Just because they can’t consent doesn’t mean we can’t infer what their interests are.
Most of these people are just depressed and universalize that experience onto everyone else. But the reality is that most people are glad they were born, and parents can reasonably predict how the lives of their children will be. People who can’t provide a good environment for their kids should abstain, but I would even argue that for those who can, having kids is morally good since it brings the joys of life to more people.
You are arguing that most people enjoy life, and those who predict that others’ lives will be full of suffering tend to projecting their own feelings onto those as yet unborn. The antinatalist might argue that, though historically this may have been the case, the circumstances are now different: climate change or the likelihood of nuclear war (for example) is sure to bring suffering hitherto unknown to us, for everyone in the coming generations. The debate would then be about (1) how certain this future suffering is, (2) whether there’s a type of suffering that makes any life not worth living (or whether the value of life even relates to what suffering it contains), and (3) how much suffering, or what kind of suffering, we can best predict for these future people. We can have these debates, but I don’t think it’s obvious that the reasoning of someone who disagrees with you must be “pants-on-head level”. These are serious questions that intelligent people can consider, and the antinatalist position is a serious position that you don’t have to be an idiot to arrive at.
Historically, approximately half of children died before the age of 5.
But I also don’t think it’s fair to compare modern reproduction with historical, because the contexts are very different. For starters, it is more of a conscious choice now due to modern contraceptives.
Secondly, modern society (at least in developed nations) tend to place a significant value on human life. Look at how things like medicine and safety have improved over the past 100 years, and of course the huge drop in child mortality rates. There is much more consideration given to individual well-being. There is of course another angle to look at: maximizing joy vs minimizing suffering. Positive utilitarianism vs negative utilitarianism. Antinatalism clearly focuses on the latter.
Not really. Just because you find something unethical doesn’t mean any of the shit you’re writing and implying here. You want people to think those random Redditors are murderers or would want to be but we both know that’s false.