As you know, I’ve engaged myself in a long-term reading project to better understand human history, and to read the great works of every century. As I go, I’ve been noting passages that express strong anti-natal ideas. I may write more thoughts on anti-natalism at another time, but for now I share this “sourcebook of anti-natal thinking”, or this “anti-natal reader”, if you like. It certainly does not exhaust the literature I’ve explored so far, but I have been making notes when passages jump out at me, and I intend to keep recording what I find as I continue reading (hence the designation Vol. 1). Some are longer, some are shorter, but they all somehow express the idea that it would have been better never to have been.
Job 3:3-4, 11, 20
“May the day I was born be wiped out.
May the night be wiped away when people said, ‘A boy is born!’
“Why didn’t I die when I was born?
Why didn’t I die as I came out of my mother’s body?
“Why should those who suffer ever be born?
Why should life be given to those whose spirits are bitter?”
Ecclesiastes 4:3: But most fortunate of all are those who are not yet born. For they have not seen all the evil that is done under the sun.
Jewish saying: Life is so terrible, it would have been better not to have been born. Who is so lucky? Not one in a hundred thousand.
Gregory of Nyssa: The physical bringing of children into the world — I speak without wishing to offend — is as much a starting-point of death as of life; because from the moment of birth the process of dying commences…[A]ll the dearly-prized blisses, and transports, and comforts of marriage end in these agonies of grief. — On Virginity, Ch. 13
Herodotus: The Trausi, who in all else conform to the customs of other Thracians, do as I will show at the times of birth and death. When a child is born, the kinsmen sit around it and lament all the ills that it must endure from its birth onward, recounting all the sorrows of men. The dead, however, they bury with celebration and gladness, asserting that he is rid of so many ills and has achieved a state of complete blessedness. — The Histories, Book 5, Ch. 4
Seneca: If the dead retain no feeling whatever, my brother has escaped from all the troubles of life, has been restored to the place which he occupied before his birth, and, being free from every kind of ill, can neither fear, nor desire, nor suffer: what madness then for me never to cease grieving for one who will never grieve again? If the dead have any feeling, then my brother is now like one who has been let out of a prison in which he has long been confined…
Why then am I wasting away with grief for one who is either in bliss or non-existent? it would be envy to weep for one who is in bliss, it would be madness to weep for one who has no existence whatever … If you reckon it up properly, he has been spared more than he has lost … If we are to believe some profound seekers after truth, life is all torment. — Of Consolation: To Polybius
St. Ambrose: What shall I say of those two-year-old children of Bethleham, who received the palm of victory before they felt their natural life within them? — On the Duties of the Clergy, Book 1, Ch. 41
Gospel of the Egyptians:
1: When Salome asked, “How long 1 will death prevail?” the Lord replied, “For as long as you women bear children.” (Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies, 3, 45, 3)
2: For they claim that the Savior himself said, “I have come to destroy the works of the female.” By “the female” he meant desire and by “works” he meant birth and degeneration. (Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies, 3, 63, 1)
4: Why do those who adhere to everything except the gospel rule of truth not cite the following words spoken to Salome? For when she said, “Then I have done well not to bear children” (supposing that it was not suitable to give birth), the Lord responded, “Eat every herb, but not the one that is bitter.” (Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies, 3, 66, 1–2)
Coptic Gospel of Thomas:
56 Jesus said, “Whoever has come to understand the world has found (only) a corpse, and whoever has found a corpse is superior to the world.”
79 A woman from the crowd said to him, “Blessed are the womb which bore you and the breasts which nourished you.” He said to [her], “Blessed are those who have heard the word of the father and have truly kept it. For there will be days when you will say, ‘Blessed are the womb which has not conceived and the breasts which have not given milk.’ ”
St. Ambrose: Let us compare, if it pleases you, the advantages of married women with that which awaits virgins. Though the noble woman boasts of her abundant offspring, yet the more she bears the more she endures. Let her count up the comforts of her children, but let her likewise count up the troubles. She marries and weeps. How many vows does she make with tears. She conceives, and her fruitfulness brings her trouble before offspring. She brings forth and is ill. How sweet a pledge which begins with danger and ends in danger, which will cause pain before pleasure! It is purchased by perils, and is not possessed at her own will.
Why speak of the troubles of nursing, training, and marrying? These are the miseries of those who are fortunate. A mother has heirs, but it increases her sorrows. For we must not speak of adversity, lest the minds of the holiest parents tremble. Consider, my sister, how hard it must be to bear what one must not speak of. And this is in this present age. But the days shall come when they shall say: “Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bare.”…
Why should I further speak of the painful ministrations and services due to their husbands from wives, to whom before slaves God gave the command to serve? And I mention these things that they may comply more willingly, whose reward, if approved, is love; if not approved, punishment for the fault.
Those men, though wicked, have one point at any rate, wherein they are approved even by the wise persons, that in speaking against marriage they declare that they ought not to have been born. — On Virginity, Book 1, Ch. 6-7
Plotinus: But if the mingled strand of life is to us, though entwined with evil, still in the total a good, must not death be an evil? Evil to What? There must be a subject for the evil: but if the possible subject is no longer among beings, or, still among beings, is devoid of life... why, a stone is not more immune…If, on the contrary, after death life and soul continue, then death will be no evil but a good; Soul, disembodied, is the freer to ply its own Act…Remember that the good of life, where it has any good at all, is not due to anything in the partnership but to the repelling of evil by virtue; death, then, must be the greater good…In a word, life in the body is of itself an evil but the Soul enters its Good through Virtue, not living the life of the Couplement but holding itself apart, even here. — Ennead 1, Tractate 7 (“On Happiness”)
Luke 23:29: For, behold, the days are coming, in the which they shall say, Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bare, and the paps which never gave suck.
Tolstoy: "But," said I, with astonishment, "how would the human race continue?"
"But what is the use of its continuing?" he rejoined, vehemently.
"What! What is the use? But then we should not exist."
"And why is it necessary that we should exist?"
"Why, to live, to be sure."
"And why live? The Schopenhauers, the Hartmanns, and all the Buddhists, say that the greatest happiness is Nirvana, Non-Life; and they are right in this sense,--that human happiness is coincident with the annihilation of 'Self.' Only they do not express themselves well. They say that Humanity should annihilate itself to avoid its sufferings, that its object should be to destroy itself. Now the object of Humanity cannot be to avoid sufferings by annihilation, since suffering is the result of activity. The object of activity cannot consist in suppressing its consequences. The object of Man, as of Humanity, is happiness, and, to attain it, Humanity has a law which it must carry out. This law consists in the union of beings. This union is thwarted by the passions. And that is why, if the passions disappear, the union will be accomplished. Humanity then will have carried out the law, and will have no further reason to exist." — The Kreutzer Sonata, Ch. 11
Gregory Nazianzen: My body is in bad shape, and old age shows upon my head. I have a combination of anxieties: there are raids into my business, I have no trust in my friends, and the church is without a shepherd. Virtues bid me farewell, vices are laid bare; I am a ship in the night, nowhere is there a beacon—Christ is asleep. Why must I suffer? For me, there is just one end to vice: death. — Epistle 80
Olaudah Equiano: In the first expressions of my grief, I reproached my fate, and wished I had never been born. — The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
Futurama: Bender: Dying sucks butt. How do you living beings cope with mortality?
Leela: Violent outbursts.
Amy: General sluttiness.
Fry: Thanks to denial, I’m immortal.
Bender: Damn it, I’m supposed to be perfect. Inspector Five gave me his blessing! How could he bring me into this world, knowing I would die?
Zoidberg: So you wish you were never born, maybe?
Bender: Yes. Anything less than immortality is a complete waste of time. — Season 7, Ep. 6
Macarius the Great: The old man in tears said, “Alas the day when that man was born!” — Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Macarius the Great No. 38
Venantius Fortunatus: Adorned by these virtues you radiate brilliant light; possessing these jewels you too shine as a jewel…The virgin does not oppress her flesh, enervated by the child within, or lie heavy in pregnancy, grieved by her own offspring. Amid the seething turmoil of mind and body, enfeebled health hangs by an uncertain thread, when the womb is hurt by its own darts and swells up and the sick dropsy of pleasure grows larger in sizer. The skin is so extremely distended beyond the human frame that the mother is ashamed what she bears out of love. She flees and in shame removes herself from her parents, until her burden has released and laid aside its load. Who can adequately express in words the cries of childbirth, or who is able to weep so many tears in verse, when the frame releases the hidden load it carried, and the burden wracks the flesh with grievous pain? Succumbing to childbirth the gate of the body lies open, and an infant comes out to the light perhaps without life. The mother, forgetful of herself, asks if her son is alive, and sadly turns her weary eyes to the child. She looks at the fosterling laid out, no longer now his mother; she had such difficulty bearing him and now she has only a corpse. She was not entitled by her offspring to be called a mother nor yet a virgin; bemoaning these two losses she mourns her unhappy marriage. The snatching away of her hope did not…her strong grief, nor did she comfort herself with the tears in her son. She did not drink the sweet tears from the face of her child or dispel his tender cries with the flow of her mild. Sadly with feeble lament she denounces her womb; the breast on which that baby lay is, alas, stricken with grief. But what if the child survives, though not forever, to being too make gentle sounds with his voice, lisping halting utterances from his unpracticed tongue, when the whispers from his sweet throat nourish his mother—and then a tragedy should happen and his snatched from his mother’s breast? The increase in years has only added to the loss. Sadly the bereaved mother with disheveled hair presses her dry breast to the lips of the dead child. In a flood of tears she passionately revives her laments and waters the icy body with a warming spring. She tears at her face, pulls out her hair, and beats her breasts; alas, her grief takes up arms and assaults her body and bitterly gives that his age-mate has died. Whether another child cries, runs, stands still, or rejoices, the image of her own son plays before her eyes. The child she once gave birth to at every moment she misses and no child is intent on the wretched mother’s face. What if something still worse should happen, her husband himself should die? Now the newlywed is led to being a widow. From bridal chamber to burial, her white so quickly changed to black, she holds the cold body that previously gave her warmth, arranges a funeral and celebrating the reverse of her wedding vows, adorns a tomb, alas, with the spoils of her marriage bed. She often returns to her husband’s grave with her laments, and avoiding her house lovingly honors the dead. She falls on his grave in search of an empty consolation; in the past she clung tight to his body, now she clings to his bones. With floods of tears she mourns in an ineffectual refrain; in paying respects to the dead her love destroys her vision. Who can recount the evils that come to an ordinary woman… — Poems Book 8 Number 3 (320-400)
Tertullian: In addition to the reasons already advanced, some say they wish to contract marriage because they desire to live on in their posterity and because they seek the bitter sweet with comes of having children. To us this is sheer nonsense… Why did our Lord prophesy, Woe to them that are with child and that give suck, if He did not mean that on the day of our great exodus children will be a handicap to those who bear them? — Ad Uxorem, Book 1, Ch. 5
Tertuallian: And when will there be any end of marrying? I suppose, when there is an end of living! — Exhortation to Chastity, Ch. 9
Tertullian: Let them then harvest the fruit of their repeated nuptials—right seasonable fruits they are for the latter days—swollen breasts and nauseating wombs and whimpering infants. — On Monogamy, Ch. 16
St. Gregory the Great: …and though both plenty of wealth and her young years were great allurements to a second marriage, yet she made choice rather to be married spiritually to God, in which after mourning everlasting joy doth follow: than to become again subject to carnal matrimony, which always beginneth with joy, and in conclusion endeth with sorrow. — Dialogues, Book 4, Ch. 13
St. Augustine: For it is not happiness to have children, but to have good ones. Labour in the task of nourishing them, if they be born; but if they be not born, give thanks unto God. — Exposition on Psalm 128