Some Want High Birth Rates. Others Would Rather See Humans Go Extinct
In 2019, an offbeat viral news story caught the attention of Jack Boswell, a radio presenter for the BBC and podcast producer from London. A man in Mumbai, India, was poised to sue his parents for birthing him without his consent, arguing that life is suffering and the planet would be improved if humans stopped reproducing. The absurd legal action never went forward (the would-be plaintiff’s parents were both lawyers, no less), but the symbolic threat threw a spotlight on the philosophy he was articulating, known as anti-natalism.
“That drew a lot of more people into the movement,” Boswell says. He became interested in others who share similar views “and what toll that would take on their lives.” Falling down the rabbit hole of Reddit‘s r/antinatalism, a community of more than a quarter of a million users who resist the biological imperative to procreate so as to avoid subjecting any offspring to the harms of illness, pain, struggle, and death, he was inspired to begin work on an independent documentary that became I Wish You Were Never Born, which as of Friday is free to stream online. The thoughtful film follows Boswell as he travels through the U.S., probing into the lives and homes (and various eccentricities) of those who see human extinction as a net positive, and having a child as a selfish act — making yet another person destined to have the same problems and weaknesses as everyone else.
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These bracingly honest interviews arrive at a moment when the opposing ideology, pro-natalism, is getting much more press. There are prominent advocates like Simone and Malcolm Collins, who went viral thanks to a 2023 article that detailed their efforts to increase birth rates through a lobbying group they founded (they have four children of their own and say they want as many as 13). Pro-natalism also has a powerful advocate in billionaire Elon Musk, father of 11 known children, who has voiced his alarm at a supposedly impending global population collapse (demographers dismiss these concerns). He has linked his warnings of a fertility crisis to the racist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which holds that non-white immigrants to western countries are having enough babies to make whites a minority group in the near future — necessitating harsher border policies and increased domestic birth rates.
Boswell says he didn’t talk to pro-natalists for I Wish You Were Never Born because, while they may be outspoken, they essentially represent the default position: that we should keep our species going. He explains that the anti-natalists, meanwhile, “even if you disagree completely with the philosophy, cross over with lots of much more mainstream kind of topics that are being discussed much more widely, whether it is climate change or the right to die and assisted suicide.” He sits with a gun enthusiast in San Antonio who recalls being physically beaten by his father as punishment, a gender-queer Chicago artist first awakened to the cause by a line from a children’s adaptation of the novel The Phantom of the Opera, a London man who got a vasectomy in his early twenties, and even the abrasive comedian Doug Stanhope — because Stanhope has joked that paying for his then-wife’s abortion many years ago was the “best thing” he’s done with his life.
The portraits that emerge are not as fatalist as you might presume, even if Boswell’s subjects are incredibly blunt about what they view as the unimportance of consciousness and the advantages of nonexistence. “I’ve had a couple of people who I showed an early cut to and they said, ‘Oh, I liked them a lot more than I thought I would,” he says. “The fact is, most of the time, [anti-natalism] gets such a visceral reaction that I sort of wanted to humanize them, even if they have views that most people would would think are pretty crazy.” Their willingness to engage with thorny ideas — whether depression begets anti-natalist sentiment, or vice versa, for example — makes them extremely compelling on camera. “They’re all very genuine,” Boswell says. “They’re all very open.”
One of the most eye-opening conversations is with Danny Shine, a British anti-natalist activist known for taking his message to the streets of London with a megaphone, but had three children before taking up his current reproductive politics. Asked whether he regrets becoming a father, Shine says he doesn’t spend time wishing he could change the past, though “I think it would have been better had I never been born, and it would have been better had they never been born, for many reasons. Because if they’d never been born, they wouldn’t have any problems.” (Perhaps unsurprisingly, his family declined to appear in the documentary.)
These vulnerable moments make for an effective and sometimes profound contrast to anti-natalist YouTube videos or Facebook and Reddit posts that Boswell describes as “provocative and outright scary.” On the internet, it’s almost natural to drift toward the extreme fringe, and this movement, like any, can create cynical echo chambers. “I read one [r/antinatalism post] early on, right after the Russia-Ukraine war started, where someone was like, ‘Could nuclear war be the best thing in the world?'” he says. Thankfully, he adds, the commenters reasonably pointed out that causing millions to suffer a slow and gruesome death from radiation poisoning was not a desirable outcome.
Still, there are plenty of controversial opinions to chew over in I Wish You Were Never Born — starting with the cheeky title. Boswell navigates them with empathetic curiosity, always seeking out the root cause. If nothing else, it will make you appraise your own ideals around conception, parenthood, social responsibilities, and stewardship of the planet. Making the film didn’t turn him into an anti-natalist, Boswell says, and indeed reinforced some of his disagreements with them. “That you shouldn’t bring people into the world because life is terrible — I don’t agree with that,” he notes. Other remarks, however, he seems to absorb as compelling or at least worthwhile points. To use a cliché in earnest: this is a documentary that literally does make you think.
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