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Feminisme

The Anti-Childbirth Advocates Who Say We're All Better Off Dead

"Sentience just opens everyone up to suffering, whether they're human or animal."

Some of us might have wailed "I never asked to be born!" at our parents while in the grip of teenage angst. But what if you took this as a statement worth examining instead of writing it off a phase? What if you followed it through to its conclusion—that it's morally wrong to have children at all?

Welcome to antinatalism, a previously obscure branch of philosophy that has developed a cult online following. While the decision to remain child-free has become more common generally—a record number of women in the US now don't have kids—antinatalists go beyond simply not wanting to reproduce due to personal or environmental reasons. According to the Reddit forum /r/antinatalism, they "assign a negative value to birth" and believe that, because the world is so full of suffering, it's unfair to force that on another person by bringing them into it.

Ultimately, they advocate the extinction of the human race.

Twitter user @Roxxane_cams, a 36 year old who goes by the name of Laura, is one of the movement's most vocal online supporters. As well as tweeting daily about her beliefs, she also likes to start debates while working her day job as a camgirl. "I'm probably the world's first and only antinatalist webcam model," she laughs. "I've got in debates about it all over the internet."

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