A Casual Reproductive Justice Reply To Anti-Natalism
Introduction:
The following is an Oct 1st, 2025 transcript from a candid, casual conversation about anti-natalism, which is the belief that we should not reproduce and have more children. In this conversation are reproductive justice activists of color, most of whom are trans and queer. They discuss the western/white thinking behind this growing movement online, radical joy, suffering, and liberation. A central argument of anti-natalism is that if we don’t exist, we can avoid experiencing or causing harm. We argue that suffering doesn’t negate what makes existence worthwhile. We discuss the nuance of suffering, things that are inevitable, and things that we are organizing around daily. We know this is not an exhaustive response to the anti-natalism philosophy, but it is worth documenting. This is an archival memory of what folks who spend their day conceptualizing relation, belonging, and liberation thought about existence itself.
We start our transcript in the middle of a conversation. AA mentions adding articles to our internal media library written by BIPOC theorists who use language other than family abolition. Decolonizing. Indigenizing. Redefining. Part of our work on the research team was to see how we might decenter white epistemology and white language. How can we be rigorous and diligent in our scholarship that is founded on BIPOC ways of knowing? Not Marx. Not the history of white, settler families, as is the focus of family abolitionists like Sophie Lewis. What is relevant and liberatory for us as trans and queer people of color? And despite the inevitability of suffering, harm, and discomfort, isn’t liberation worth existing for?
AA:
this really big thing called the Captive Maternal: people who are forced into specific roles because of specific aspects. And [Joy James] goes deep into it, so I added a bunch of pieces on that [to our resource library]. There’s also Indigenous writers [I added] who talk about decolonizing family.AG-YA:
suffering abolition,” which really resonated as a way to think about it. How could we, within the context of…harm reduction, end suffering? How are you bringing people into this world?B:
How do you feel anti-natalism is in alignment and not in alignment with our RJ principles?
AN:
In relation to [peers my age], there’s always this connection to climate justice, or they ask in response, “Why would I bring a kid into this harmful world?” But there’s still this curiosity or desire of parenting, or [self-advocacy saying,] “I’d be a good mother or parent, but with all things considered, there’s things I’m working through.” There isn’t necessarily this connection linguistically yet. There’s never the full rejection…people still bring up the need for care, and caring for children, and still upholding that responsibility, which I think is interesting.
AA:
When I think of anti-natalism, I think of one of my friends…whenever I ask them about kids, they’ve always told me, “I’m 100% having children.” I recently asked them, “Why is it that you still want kids, even though everything is so fucked up?” And their answer was super simple. It was, “Someone has to have kids, and it might as well be me.”
I was like, “You ate that, you really did, that’s so real.”
When I see posts [about] anti-natalism and how bad the world is, I’m always just thinking about, like, if you can actually…do the work of raising children…not just have 18 children…and leave them in the wilds. [And not just] focus on, like, posting cute pictures on Instagram or whatever. If you’re actually gonna do the work.
I remember having a conversation randomly about children [with someone], and they said something similar, like, “Someone has to usher in the new world or usher in the newest years. Might as well [be] people who have actually been properly cared for, and who have actually been brought into this idea of actual stewardship of relationships in the world that they live in.”
Literally, the Right Capitalists, they’re having babies by the buckets! Elon Musk has, like, 18 children!
I think a lot about Freedom Dreams and the quote that Freedom Dreams is based off of, which is, “Freedom Dreams come out of fascist nightmares.” Things don’t get better because everyone decides everything is bad, and let’s just stop everything. Things get better because people keep living.
AN:
There was a post [where] they interviewed mothers in Gaza and why [they] still have babies [while] living in those conditions, which I thought was really powerful. I made this connection when I was watching this show that got [adapted from] a manga, but essentially it’s like, a bunch of rich folks who put their children in this academy to “come out tough” and be some of the strongest [capitalists] out there. And I [made the connection that] you’re right, [the rich are] still having families to uphold either wealth, strata, or this legacy that they’re emboldening.
B:
When I think of anti-natalism, I hear the argument that, like, suffering is inevitable, and so it is unethical to create existence just for them to experience suffering. You will experience and cause suffering, right? Because you ate an animal, or you plucked a mushroom. To exist is to cause the suffering of some other existing source…This is what it means to be alive. Existence isn’t only worth it if everything is perfect and happy, and you have this amazing, perfect, experience. Sometimes I sit with those critiques, and yeah, suffering is inevitable. I’ve heard people say you can’t name one non-selfish reason to have a child. Maybe I could, but even if I can’t, it’s not the actual question, because sometimes people just be pregnant. Like, with the rates of pregnancy in Gaza, is it the lack of birth control? Is it…people doing what they do at the end of the world? Like, oh my god, we’re still alive, and now I’m pregnant. And so, it doesn’t matter if it’s a selfish reason or not; people often act in their own self-interest and preservation. So, it’s just a non-argument, I guess. I’m like, yes, that’s also what humans do.
Humans are humaning is how I’ve interpreted those arguments because, as someone who just had a kid and who had to go out of their way and didn’t just Whoop! [become pregnant], there was this conversation of, like, why go out of your way to bring a being into the world who may then experience suffering, climate disaster, all these things. If there is some future that we believe is possible as radical leftists, if we’re building this magical world, why wouldn’t I want a dark-skinned Black person to be in the future? I’m not building this great world for the converted children of white supremacists who realize at the end that I was right all along. I’m not building this world for you. Why wouldn’t my kid be in this magical future if I really believe it’s possible?
AA:
And if we want this beautiful world, we have to have someone who lives in it.B:
People get related through collective experiences. I really do think I’m related to every single Jamaican, it’s just too small an island. But even if you don’t want to take this biologically, there is this moment of being enslaved on this island and having countless rebellions on this island that make you related to each other. Because how could you exist without that person burning down the plantation so you can leave with your kids? … I would not exist without that. I exist because of the people, and I have a lot of debt and reverence to people who were enslaved at that time and said, “Hell no, I’m not having kids,” “I’m having this abortion,” “I’m burning down this plantation and I’m running to the hills, and you’re not gonna see me have no damn kids.” [As well as], “I am going to have kids once I burn the plantation down,” or maybe, “I can’t burn the plantation down, and I’m still gonna have these kids, whether it’s because I’m forced to, or I choose to.”
I’m related to all of those people, whether they are part of my genetic lineage or just a part of this literary lineage and collective trauma that we survived. They still thought that it would make sense [in] some way, shape, or form, for me to be where I am today. And I have that same radical hope for people that come after me, whether by blood…I don’t even have biological children, but by blood, by resource, by love, support.
LA:
AA:Incels are very much like, no one likes me, and no one wants to spend time with me, and it’s like, okay, so what are you going to do about that? Are you gonna make yourself a little less insufferable to be around? And that’s how anti-natalism comes to me: how are you actively trying to make your little corner of the earth better for yourself, for the people around you? That’s also…how it ties into my thinking of family abolition, like being anti-anti-natalism, because I think so much about family abolition to me, and abolition in general, is about how do we make the world more loving and more sustainable for everyone around us? And saying, “Well, the world sucks and it’s never gonna change.” Like, yeah, of course it’s not gonna change, because…you said it! Like, you’re not gonna do anything, so of course it’s not gonna change.
B:
[A few of us watched Anti-Natalism – Should We Have Babies] because I just had a lot of interest in seeing what people are talking about who don’t have an RJ [reproductive justice] analysis, right? Like, when it’s missing in the room. How do you all start to conceptualize the world? And you’ve got the natalists on the right who are saying, “Birth, birth, birth, and no abortions,” and you’ve got folks who aren’t politicized in RJ who are like, “The most radical thing you could do is [not have kids]”… and I feel like, low-key, sometimes I hear that from Sophie Lewis.
Ayesha Khan, The Woke Therapist, sometimes veered into that, too. She’s got, like, a million followers, has all these amazing politics in general, but then when it comes to RJ, it just…falls apart. [She argues that] people should adopt the kids that are already here. “I’m very strong about abortion, abortion rights for all…” What are you saying about people who choose to give birth right now? So it happens in spaces that don’t have an RJ analysis, and I was just trying to understand that more, because I think it keeps coming up.
AN:
[About choice, autonomy:] It’s always forgotten, or, like, they’ll say climate justice, or poverty, all these things before it’s, like…choice? I don’t know. It comes back to…the [lack of] RJ inclusion, or…it feels like a gap.
LA:
I also think it really teaches us…a lesson around making absolute stances around…even when we talk about, like, family abolition.
Abolition is about transformation, right? It’s not just about, like…ending something—this thing is absolutely bad, and we need to end it, and that’s it, wipe our hands, we’re cool.
It’s about transforming the world so that all of the varied formations, the varied ways that we live and embody the world are held and supported and cared for, and I think that with these conversations, like pro-natalist versus anti-natalist…we’re missing the mark because we’re not going to the root, right? Where pro-natalists are saying, “We need to have a bunch of babies because the world is dying.” I’m like, “Hey, the world is dying regardless.” Not only that, why are we not building the infrastructures and the support networks so that even if older populations outnumber the youth, there is enough love and support and care, and there’s an infrastructure to take care of that changing world—that changing environment?
And we know that the way these systems are operating right now, they’re going to lead to our…demise, but nobody wants to talk about that. They want to blame the individual, or blame the people and say, “Well, we need to have more people to automate the system,” and that is a death politic.
But then the anti-natalism response is to be like, “No, we’re just not gonna have anything.” But we’re not actually getting to the root of the discussion, we’re not actually having more conversations that we need to be having. So I think that this is a good…lesson for us. What are the traps that we want to avoid when we’re having these conversations around birthing?
AA:
Earlier in the conversation, we were very much talking about, like, “Let’s just have some kids, why not?” And I still stand by that in my friend groups, specifically regarding the people who want to have children. But I also agree that it is a conversation that needs nuance, because people should be able to have children, and…we’re getting into the pillars of repro[ductive justice]: the right to have a child, the right to not. But…really emphasizing both parts, because there’s nuance to these conversations…We can’t say, like, have 100 million children, but we also don’t want to say, don’t have any children…
I was thinking about… abolition. I was thinking a lot about the Ruth Wilson Gilmore quote that I feel like people always name check about abolition as presence, not absence, and it made me think…when we talk about family abolition or family formation, how can we really emphasize the presence part? We’re not trying to tear down the family, but we’re trying to bring something that isn’t there. And how do we create this new structure?
I found this article…I felt like the person who wrote it had some good points. And it’s about why, as a leftist, they’re not a family abolitionist. And I felt like a lot of the things that they were saying are things that we were saying before about family and how their issue with Sophie Lewis was that she treats family as just a space for reproductive [labor].
[About mentioned article:] This person says the family is not just a factory for bourgeois subjects, it’s also an independent realm of social life distinct from the state. Looked at this way, the family is a human relationship that capitalists and the state are…always trying to capture and control.
I think one of the issues with a lot of family abolitionists is that they…name-check the family as a social thing, but they don’t actually believe it in their hearts, because so many of them are people whom the family has failed, and I think that’s something that I really want us ground in [and] emphasize. We are people who still…understand the family mostly as a social relationship above all things. How do we talk about the family and these hardcore things, and how [do] we talk about creating something new while still grounding in that?
B:
Something that you made me think about…I’ve wanted to think of how to say it for a while, too, is like…I think some of the arguments by white family abolitionists fall apart when you’re no longer talking about the U.S. context. Like, going back to the idea of Jamaica, my family is from [Hampton] Town, Jamaica…Everybody has the last name [Hampton]. Multiple people have come to me [and said] you are literally related to any Jamaican with the last name [Hampton]. They are from [Hampton] Town. You are related to them. And so I’m thinking about, like, if we were to take this concept to the people of [Hampton] Town, where everybody’s already a biological relative, to say that family is beyond the…biological root is there, but also not there. It’s not even a thing, because the community is your entire biological family of 300 plus people. It loses its meaning, this idea of who’s biologically related and who isn’t, when everybody is already related. I just get curious about…which family are we critiquing?
AA:
I was one of those children running from adult to adult when I was growing up very briefly in Ghana, and…who knows who my parents were? My parents were not even there, but my parents were there…The Western mind can’t comprehend that. Not to be crass, but even as a child, I knew where my milk was coming from…
B:
[White westerners looking in] don’t understand because they see a caregiver unburdened and sharing childrearing with other people. And just because your caregivers have robust support doesn’t mean you don’t know who you’re related to. To L’lerrét’s language, it ungrammars relationship and care from a nuclear family and a particular gender performance.
Conclusion:
Our conversation concluded shortly afterwards, but it’s a topic we think reproductive justice activists should continue often. As mentioned in the transcript, internet algorithms can funnel people down particular paths, and despite having leftist ideals, our potential comrades in reproductive justice can end up in schools of thought that harm our movements. Decolonizing, abolishing, reindigenizing concepts of family is not in step with anti-natalism. Children, elders, caregivers, besties, lovers, close relationships can exist in the world we’re fighting for. The labor that it takes to care for those intimate connections must be more widely held. Communities that feel responsible for mitigating and healing from suffering is what we’re trying to bring into existence.