In cases where it looks certain, or very probable, on the basis of diagnostic tests, that, if a couple were to beget a child, this child would suffer from some serious disease, then this couple themselves, along with the doctors advising them and members of their social circle, very probably be inclined, or be urgently advised by those around them, to go back on any decision to have children that they may already have taken.
In a definite ethical disproportion to this situation, there are surely very many fewer couples, doctors or social circles who would incline, or advise, to give up an already-formed wish for children, or to go back on a pro-generative decision already taken, simply because it has become clear to the prospectively procreating couple – for whatever reasons or due to whatever exceptional circumstance or life-situation – that every human being must sooner or later become sick, suffer and die and what terrible forms the process of dying can sometimes take. [Catastrophe of Dying].
This is all the more astonishing given that having to die counts, for many, as the greatest of all evils. Pro-generative decisions are often gone back on in the face of comparatively much lesser evils. But a drawing of attention to something that is, for many people, the greatest evil of all is rarely if ever accepted as sufficient reason for going back on a pro-generative decision once this latter has been taken. It is clearly, then, not always the case that, the more grave and certain the evil is that can be expected to befall a new human being when action is taken such as to cause this human being’s existence to begin, the more willingly the action that brings about the beginning of his existence will be forgone. This we call the non-proportionality in revisions of pro-generative decisions. It fulfils the condition of an act “with malice aforethought”: the procreating parties implicitly accept and approve, among other things, the necessity of the death of a human being (their own child!) because this is the only way that they can come into possession of a child.
antinatalismblog 