A car bomb exploded outside a fertility clinic in Palm Springs, CA, a few weeks ago, injuring four, but killing only the driver.
Initial reports speculated that the attack was committed by pro-life terrorists, since pro-lifers generally oppose such IVF clinics for destroying the “extra” human embryos that are not implanted. But it turns out that terrorist, 25-year-old Guy Edward Bartkus, was not pro-life. He was pro-death. Literally, pro-death.
Authorities found some of his writings identifying himself as a “pro-mortalist,” a word that means “pro-death.” A reporter described his “manifestos as being against bringing people into the world without their consent to spare them from future suffering.”
Somehow we have to find a way to procure a baby’s consent before he or she comes into existence. This is in line with that curious development that I have written about, that the will has replaced the intellect in contemporary ethics, so that what makes an action moral or immoral is whether or not someone has chosen a course of action. According to the new sexual morality, everything goes, as long as both partners consent. Killing sick or unhappy people is moral,, as long as the person chooses to die. The sexual mutilation and sterilization of children is a good thing, as long as this is what the child wants. And, of course, those who believe in abortion call themselves pro-choice.
At one point, I challenged that euphemism by calling supporters of abortion “pro-death,” on analogy of opponents of abortion calling themselves “pro-life.” But that didn’t catch on. Properly, Bartkus’s philosophy should demonstrate the absurdity of reducing right and wrong to “consent,” since so much of life–including our very existence–exists far outside our will.
But it turns out, being “pro-death” is actually a thing. It is a variety of antinatalism, which we have blogged about, the opposition to having children. A corollary of this belief, which not all antinatalists adhere to but which follows logically from their position, is that being alive is something bad.
In a column about Bartkus’s attack, Rich Lowry quotes an article about this ideology by journalist Elise Solé:
Antinatalism is a spectrum. Some believe that there should be no sentient life, including animals or even technology with the potential for sentience, like artificial intelligence. Others think it’s just humans that should go extinct.
Wesley J. Smith shows that such “pro-mortalism” is not all that uncommon. He lists a number of examples, for example:
–Oxford Professor Roger Crisp wrote an article entitled Would Extinction Be So Bad?, in which he says, “no.” If we went extinct, he argues, that would prevent the suffering of future generations. He writes, “The best outcome would be the immediate extinction that follows from allowing an asteroid to hit our planet.”
–This is a regular theme of environmentalists, says Smith. “Thus, David Suzuki has called us “maggots” who spend our lives ‘defecating all over the environment.’ Sir David Attenborough has supported radical human depopulation because he reviles us as a ‘plague on the earth.’ Paul Watson, founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, has called us the ‘AIDS of the earth,’ stating that ‘curing the biosphere of the human virus will . . . require a radical and invasive approach.’”
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