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?”
Someone who hasn’t been conceived yet will be born sooner or later (following successful conception and gestation). Their lack of ability to consent is temporary.
Come on mate. Just to point out the obvious here…
The ability of a yet-to-be-conceived entity to consent to being conceived is not temporary, given that its not possible to consent to something retrospectively.
So we’re back to: you can’t get consent for creating a new life. Since consent can’t be obtained, you have to justify the position of doing something that affects someone without their consent.
There is precedence for this. I think a better analogy, that avoids the paradoxical issues of non-existence, would be life-saving treatment for someone who is unconscious. The treatment can either be administered (without consent, due to the patient being unconscious) to save their life. Or the treatment can be withheld and the patient dies. Justifying this treatment is predicated on the treatment being to the benefit of the recipient and is generally accepted with some various exceptions.
Many people would be of the opinion that creating a new person is beneficial to said new person. However this is where the fundamental disagreement between antinatalists and pronatalists would be. Is creating a new person beneficial or detrimental to the person being created? The hard antinatalism position says that it is “always bad”, but of course the answer to this question can be conditional as well and need not be an absolute “always good” or “always bad”. And people have different thresholds for where this point is. That’s it, that’s the difference of opinion.
I don’t really care what the hard antinatalism position is in the same way I don’t care what the hard flat earth position is.
You’re talking about it as though it’s a credible ideology when in reality it is, at best, a nutty thought experiment with no real world application.
It’s not a question of whether being brought into existence is good.
As a parent, I acknowledged and accepted the risk that a potential child might not have wanted to be born. That’s it. Presently, I don’t know how I will navigate that if it turns out to be the case, the same way I don’t know how I will navigate my daughter dating or my son watching porn, but I do know I’m going to try my best to figure those things out when I encounter them.
Every parent since the dawn of time has made up solutions as problems have arisen, some better than others. No parent seriously considered whether their unconceived child consented.
It is a credible ideology, even if you disagree with it, and there are legitimate discussions to be had in academic and philosophical circles. And it absolutely does have real world applications, even if these are limited in scope:
Many people choose to personally abstain from reproduction out of these considerations.
Veganism is, at its core, a form of applied antinatalism.
The push for spay/neuter of companion animals is another direct application of this ideology
Again, there is room for it so long as it remains limited in scope and isn’t taken to an extreme degree such as engaging in abhorrent acts of violence.
Maybe it should be. If not a question of whether it is good or not, then what is it a question of? And if one does not believe that it is good, then why proceed?
This is due to selection bias. One might presume that those who do give this serious consideration would refrain from becoming parents.
If I believe in numerology and as a result decide to pat myself on the head 12 times before bed that is not evidence that numerology is not a nutty woo woo theory and has real world applications.
As I said, prospective parents need to accept the risk that their child might resent them for being born. I’m happy to consider that in the unlikely circumstance that I encounter it
Well…billions of people on this planet do believe in divine supreme beings. I assume that, for the sake of consistency, you consider deity-based religions to be nutty woo woo theories on similar grounds, yes? I should note that they believe in it to the extent of fighting actual wars over it.
I already explained the real world applications of antinatalism in my previous comments. These are real things that people do that have actual, quantifiable results.
That isn’t answering the question though. You obviously think that creating life is good for the life being created, yes? And antinatalists don’t.
Tricky one. I think most wars purportedly fought on religious grounds are in fact about power and money. Regardless any combatants that believe they’re fighting at the behest of their deity are idiots. That’s hardly a real world application, it’s just a way to manipulate people.
I don’t really accept the premise that creating a life is either good or bad for the created life. Rather, of every n lives created, what portion would prefer never to have existed? Every parent has rolled that dice and bears the consequences of harming an entity who preferred not to exist.