… why bring children into it?

We live in an age of relentless pessimism. People openly describe the world as corrupt, violent, exploitative, collapsing. Climate catastrophe is treated as inevitable. Political institutions are widely regarded as illegitimate or captured. Economic systems grind people down while enriching a few. Mental illness is endemic. War is normalized. Surveillance is constant. The future feels smaller than the past.

And yet, in the midst of it all, bringing a child into the world is treated as a moral good — often as the highest good — beyond question or critique.

This deserves examination.

If you sincerely believe the world is dangerous, unjust, and spiraling toward catastrophe, then procreation is not a neutral act. It is a decision to expose a new, defenseless person to conditions you already recognize as harmful. We should not knowingly drop a child into a burning building and call it hope. We should not place someone in a collapsing system and call it love. But when it comes to existence itself, the moral scrutiny vanishes. Why?

Because reproduction is culturally insulated from ethical analysis. It is framed as instinct, destiny, or sacred duty rather than a choice with consequences. Once an act is treated as “natural,” we stop asking whether it is just.

A child does not consent to being born. That is unavoidable. But what follows from that fact is rarely taken seriously. Once someone exists, they are compelled to participate in a system they did not choose: they must labor, obey laws, endure illness, suffer loss, and eventually die. Even the best possible life includes fear, grief, and pain. The worst lives include exploitation, abuse, hunger, and despair.

Crucially, non-existence deprives no one, while existence exposes someone to harm. This is a moral asymmetry people are deeply uncomfortable acknowledging, because it challenges one of our oldest assumptions: that life is always a gift. But a gift is something you can refuse. Existence is not.

“But they’ll make the world better!”

This is the most common defense, and it sounds noble. But it smuggles something deeply troubling into the argument. It assigns a moral burden to someone who does not yet exist. It treats a child as a future solution to problems created by adults, systems, and history. It converts hope into obligation.

If the world is broken, the responsibility to fix it belongs to those already here. Creating a new person in order to justify optimism is not hope, it is deferral. It is also a gamble. For every child who grows into a reformer, countless others will struggle to survive. Many will be crushed by the very forces they were supposed to redeem.

Another common move is to romanticize suffering. Pain becomes “growth.” Struggle becomes “meaning.” Trauma becomes “what makes us human.” This is easy to say when the suffering is abstract or belongs to someone else. But no one thanks their parents for giving them anxiety, grief, or an early death. No one looks back on war, illness, or exploitation and says, “I’m glad to endure that.” Meaning is something people construct in spite of suffering, not because suffering is good. To impose suffering without consent and then praise resilience is a moral sleight of hand.

Many people do not actively decide to have children. They drift into it. It’s what people do. It’s expected. Questioning it feels like questioning life itself, but default choices are still choices. And when the stakes involve an entire huma lifetime “I didn’t really think about it” is not an ethical defense.

Refusing to create life in a world you believe is dangerous is not nihilism. It’s moral restraint.

This argument is often misread as hatred of life or contempt for children. It is neither.

It is an attempt to take suffering seriously, to refuse to minimize it, normalize it, or pass it along out of habit or hope. It is a refusal to gamble with someone else’s pain in order to make existence feel meaningful.

If we truly believe the world is cruel, unstable, and unjust, the the most honest response may not be reproduction, but responsibility: caring for those who already exist, reducing harm where we can, and resisting the systems that make life so precarious.

Love does not require creation. Sometimes, love looks like restraint.