Procreation Is the Greatest Murder In the World

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In most people’s minds, procreation represents hope, represents love, represents life, while murder represents death, represents an ending, so putting these two things together sounds especially absurd. But people can spend months choosing a car, spend years deciding who to marry, and repeatedly calculate everything before buying a house, yet they can casually decide whether another person should come into this world, and then call all of this love.

 

When discussing procreation, we are always asking, do the parents want a child? Do they have the financial ability? When should they have one? Yet almost no one ever thinks about whether the person who is about to be born is willing to come into this world. Of course, they can never answer. And the most amazing part is exactly this: a person whose consent can never be asked for has to bear all the consequences brought by the entire decision. In other words, the child happens to be the only person who has no right to speak. And this is actually considered something completely normal??

 

Many people think that killing is crueler than procreation. But killing is making a person who would one day die die earlier. Although it is indeed morally wrong and I also do not advocate killing, procreation makes the world have one more person who will definitely die. A person who will get sick, who will feel anxious, who will have their heart broken, who will be betrayed, who will experience separation, who will grow old, and who will finally lie in a hospital bed waiting for their body to stop functioning. Of course, you can also say that they will have happiness. That is not wrong. But the problem is that what you give them is never happiness, but a fixed choice that cannot be separated. You have no right to give only happiness, because life is such a complicated experience.

 

Someone will say, but if they were never born, they would not be able to experience happiness either. This sounds very reasonable, but for a person who was never born, who exactly is feeling regret for them? They will not feel sad because they have never seen the sea, they will not suffer because they have never been in love, they will not feel empty because they have never heard music, because there is simply no “them” waiting for these things.

 

But pain is different. As long as you are born, it will definitely come. It is cancer, it is war, it is someone slapping you in the face, it is losing your parents, it is lying in a hospital bed at eighty or ninety years old and watching your body lose sensation little by little. And these things are life itself. So a person who is born receives happiness and pain, while a person who is never born will neither regret not having happiness nor have to bear any pain.

 

When I mentioned this view to my friend before, he was thinking about how heartbroken a mother would be if these words were said to her. But the problem is exactly that not everyone will become a parent, but every person must first be a child. Becoming a child is the shared experience of everyone. So when discussing procreation, why do we always like to stand on the side of the person making the decision, instead of the side of the person bearing it? The person who truly has to bear the pain is never the person who makes the decision, but the person who never had the possibility or the opportunity to refuse.

 

Someone will also say, since you are already alive, why not just enjoy happiness properly? This is such an irrelevant answer to the question, because what I have always been discussing is whether a person should be brought into this world, not whether a person who has already come into this world should try to keep living. Since I have already been born, of course I will look for happiness and look for the meaning of life, because this is reality. But adapting to reality does not mean that reality itself must be right.

 

Actually, when I was thinking about this issue before, I always thought, if everyone thought this way, humanity would have gone extinct long ago. But later I realized that this question requires accepting a default premise, which is that human beings must continue to exist. Some people will say that art will disappear, civilization will disappear, love will disappear, history will disappear. But the problem is also exactly this: is the continuation of these things really worth exchanging for generation after generation of new deaths and new lives? In order for civilization to continue to exist, we must constantly create new diseases, new fears, new aging, new deaths. In order for history to continue being written, we must constantly create new victims. If a great civilization needs people to experience pain again and again and finally experience death in order for it to continue being written, then is it really worth this price?

 

An idea will not automatically become the truth just because few people support it. An idea will also not gain correctness just because many people support it. So why is it that a person did not agree to be born, yet must bear all the consequences brought by being born, while the decision that another person made for them is called the greatest love in the world?

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