This world doesn't deserve your children. Greatest evils will befall your beloved and your love cannot save them. You cannot protect them from being eaten away by cancer, from being humiliated, raped and abused. And when time has come for you to depart, they will be left to grieve you, abandoned all alone in the world. They will lose their youth, their health, their mind, their memories. They will grow decrepit and they will die.
Will it all be worth it? There is no way of knowing. It's a gamble you play with someone else's existence. You cannot promise your child that they will have a life worth living.
And if your child looks you in the eyes and asks "I do not love living. Why did you bring me to this world?" What can you say to them? "Whoops"?
"A charmed life is so rare that for every one such life there are millions of wretched lives. Some know that their baby will be among the unfortunate. Nobody knows, however, that their baby will be one of the allegedly lucky few. Great suffering could await any person that is brought into existence. Even the most privileged people could give birth to a child that will suffer unbearably, be raped, assaulted, or be murdered brutally. The optimist surely bears the burden of justifying this procreational Russian roulette. Given that there are no real advantages over never existing for those who are brought into existence, it is hard to see how the significant risk of serious harm could be justified. If we count not only the unusually severe harms that anybody could endure, but also the quite routine ones of ordinary human life, then we find that matters are still worse for cheery procreators. It shows that they play Russian roulette with a fully loaded gunâaimed, of course, not at their own heads, but at those of their future offspring."
- David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence.
