By Shawn Hubler | The New York Times
The attack on a Palm Springs, Calif., fertility clinic last week surfaced some unsettling ideas. Guy Edward Bartkus, the 25-year-old suspect, had posted an audio clip explaining why he wanted to blow up a place that makes babies. “I would be considered a pro-mortalist,” he said before detonating his Ford Fusion, killing himself and injuring four others. “Let’s make the death thing happen sooner rather than later in life.”
Investigators called it “terrorism” and “nihilistic ideation.” Trump administration officials called it “anti-pro-life.”
Bartkus was indeed espousing an extreme ideology. But it belongs to a larger intellectual movement, still fringe for now, that is slowly gaining adherents. My colleagues Jill Cowan, Aric Toler, Jesus Jiménez and I have spent the past week reporting on what experts call “anti-natalism.” Hundreds of thousands follow accounts and podcasts about it. It holds that procreation is immoral because the inevitability of death and suffering outweighs the odds of happiness. Today’s newsletter explains.
The idea
The calculus is ancient — to be or not to be?
A South African philosopher’s 2006 treatise, “Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence,” popularized the idea in its modern form. “You’re stuck between having been born, which was a harm, but also not being able to end the harm by taking your own life, because that is another kind of harm,” the author, David Benatar, told us.
This perspective draws partly on utilitarianism, a discipline of philosophy that asks how to achieve the most good for the greatest number. But even there, anti-natalism is seen as marginal. Besides Benatar, “I don’t know any other philosophers who share it,” said Peter Singer, an influential utilitarian.
Online, however, anxieties including climate change and artificial intelligence have given it traction — as has the yearning for connection, even among people with antisocial tendencies. Scores of anti-natalist discussion boards, influencers and podcasts now debate whether all creatures should stop reproducing, or just humans.
The concepts have bled into pop culture. Thanos, the supervillain in two films from Marvel’s “Avengers” franchise, wants to eradicate half of the universe’s living beings because there are “too many mouths to feed.” The number of Americans who don’t want kids is rising, with many young people saying they don’t want to hurt the environment.
A few variants are even more extreme. An offshoot known as “efilists” — that’s “life” spelled backward — argues that DNA should also be destroyed. Pro-mortalism, the position Bartkus staked out, is less well defined. But it suggests that birth should be followed as soon as possible by a quick, consensual death.
Bartkus was a vegan from a small town in the California desert whose estranged father called him “a follower, not a leader.” As a child, the father said, he loved rockets and once nearly burned the house down. As an adult, he set off explosions in the barren wilderness. Online, he had grown close to a woman who died last month in an apparent assisted suicide.
Taking action
That woman, Sophie Tinney, 27, was shot three times in the head on Easter Sunday near Seattle, according to court records. Officials have charged her roommate with second-degree murder. But Bartkus’s manifesto says she was a suicidal anti-natalist — and may have persuaded the roommate, an Eagle Scout who liked to play Dungeons & Dragons, to shoot her in her sleep. (He has pleaded not guilty.)
Bartkus said online that Tinney’s death might have prompted the clinic bombing. “I don’t think I really knew how much it was going to affect me,” said a manifesto posted with the audio on a pro-mortalism website. Social media posts tied to him indicate that he had attempted suicide at least twice since she died. Then he videotaped a dry run for the bombing, mixing chemicals in the desert that could blow up his car.
An F.A.Q. appended to his manifesto includes a list of pro-mortalist and efilist figures; at least two of them have killed themselves in recent years. This week, the moderator of an anti-natalism Reddit forum with nearly a quarter-million members called the bombing “unjustifiable, incoherent, immoral and disgusting.” Benatar, the author, said that his philosophy explicitly abhors violence, the restriction of reproductive rights and, in almost all cases, suicide.
But ideas have a way of twisting and transforming online. One such adaptation seems to have found a young man who loved pyrotechnics and hated life.
