From Abstinence to Assistance: Antinatalism's Unexpected Endorsement of the Principle of Procreative Beneficence

This essay begins from the point that developments in antinatalism, or the view that it is wrong to bear children, place legitimate pressures on prospective parents to seriously consider the harms of bringing their prospective children into existence. This essay does not defend antinatalism but instead considers an upshot of bioethical import if one takes these antinatalist pressures seriously. Attending to the debate on the normative legitimacy of Savulescu's Principle of Procreative Beneficence (PPB), I argue that antinatalist pressures give rise to reasons that count in favor of the PPB. I show how an antinatalist-corollary version of the PPB might be derived and how we might respond to the PPB's main criticisms and conceptual difficulties.