In over 30 years of practice, Dr. Errol Billinkoff rarely saw a man without kids come into his Winnipeg clinic to get a vasectomy. But since the pandemic began, he says it's become an almost daily occurrence.
And he's not alone.
"At first, I thought I was the only one who was noticing this," Billinkoff, who brought a no-scalpel vasectomy procedure to Winnipeg in the early 1990s, told CBC News in a November interview.
"But I am part of an international chat group where doctors who do vasectomies participate and the topic came up, and it's like everybody notices it."
Being born is fine, once you're here you should try to live life to its fullest. But I don't want kids, I would be a horrid father.
How do you signal a desire to be born, practically speaking? Who do you contact to indicate your desire to begin existing?
If you don't want to exist, why not simply surrender your place in line to someone who does?
Antinatalists aren't suicidal, most likely living, they just understand that life isn't a gift.
The "I didn't ask to be born" argument implies a mechanism by which you could ask to be born.
Go down to your local NICU and survey it's residents. Tell me how many you meet who hold this view in the hours and days after their birth.
Hell, give me a survey of two year olds. Four year olds. Eight year olds, even.
I challenge you to find me any fervent anti-natalist younger than a teenager. I'll challenge you to find any that aren't terminally online.
Anti-natalism isn't a philosophy you're born into, it's something you develop over time through rational observation and logical reason. These are two skills you develop after being alive for some time, typically through dialogue with other living people.
They are not conclusions you can instinctively reach in uterus.
"I challenge you to find anything [you belief in] that isn't someone I can disregard and not think about."
Right, neither is socialism, liberalism, capitalism, nihilism, natalism, or any belief system. You only do what your parents told you to do until you start to have your own thoughts and feelings .
It's not a literal "Ask the fetus if it wants to live", it's more a "The fact we can't have informed proper consent is odd." It's not a "Haha, gotcha! You should kill yourself!"
It's more the question of "Since we can't ask, is it ethically correct?" And just doing what nature wants us to do is not always the best.
Not even going in the "muh overpopulation, kill all da browns!!" reactionary way, humans are evolutionary made to be hunter-gatherers, not make books, computers, medicine, money, or anything else we do as the species in 2024 and onwards. Apes don't know how to make an atomic bomb, humans do. Birds don't know how to construct the most deeply beautiful sonnets that make every listener weep in awe every time, humans do.
Humans are more than what we were evolved to do. We question everything, including ourselves. Sometimes the fact a question can't be answered, let alone even properly asked, is a quandary.
This is not a personal "Underpants, you need to prohibit yourself from having a kid", I can't control that for anyone but myself. I'm never going to tell a parent or someone wanting to be one that they are a selfish monster, despite what one of my parents was.
You weren't asked to be born, but you must continue it once you are. The only other choice is willful harm to yourself. If I went to a maternity ward and started smashing in skulls, I'm not an anti-natalist, I'm a murderer. It's the same reason why abortion isn't murder.
So why would you assert an unborn person holds these beliefs?
Why would you consider communicating with a non-existent entity the basis for making ethical decisions?