Evocation of the “thanatal hiatus” (the long period of time elapsing between having-been-begotten and having-to-die) serves pronatalists as a way of repudiating antinatalists’ evocation of “thanatality” as a component part of the Conditio in/humana: For the great majority of people the unwelcome necessity of having-to-die lies in so far, or at least in so abstract, a distance that thanatality does not count among the factors that diminish or compromise the happiness of existence.
Pronatalists generally provide the thanatal hiatus with the following factor of proportionality: the longer the period of time a person has left to live, the more acceptable is their having-to-die. The corollary of this is: where younger people die, be it in a natural catastrophe, in war, or in traffic accidents, this is usually portrayed in news reports as something especially tragic (with very little distinction being made here between a death in great pain and a painless one).
In contrast to the claim that pronatalists make upon the thanatal hiatus we antinatalists advance the following formulation: ceteris paribus, the shortest possible interval of time between the >Beginning of Life and the >End of Life is to be preferred; what counts, for us, as especially tragic is an agonizing death after a long life full of experiences of care and misery.
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