Should Antinatalists Adopt?

Maybe, for the kids, they should be discreet about the antinatalists?

“Bringing a child into this world (of climate change, rising fascism, general suffering, etc etc etc) is wrong, especially when there are already so many children in need. So I won’t have biological kids, but maybe I’ll adopt someday.” Okay, but is it good for the theoretical adopted kids to know that’s how their adoptive parents think about it?

When people say this—and I’ve heard it said a lot, I maybe have ended up in weirdly antinatalist environments—they are wrestling with a very serious decision, & I don’t begrudge them that. Also, of the people who say this, I don’t know how many of them go on to adopt kids,¹ so I don’t know how much this matters. But after my first, like, year of hearing people say this, it increasingly struck me how fucked up I would be if I had adoptive parents and they talked like this.

“It’s wrong to have kids but I will adopt” is a self-centered thing to say, literally; when people say it, they’re thinking about themselves and their own decisions. But when a kid hears their adoptive parent say this, they’re also going to be self-centered, thinking about themselves.

Unless the adoptive parents in question have some kind of genetic disease, the idea that it would be wrong for the adoptive parents to bring kids into this fucked up world when there are other kids who need care, necessarily implies that it was even more wrong for people to make a kid who would need to be adopted. I just think it can’t possibly be healthy for kids to grow up with the idea that their existence is wrong.

1. Which, let’s be clear, I also don’t begrudge them. Adoption is very serious and complicated, and shouldn’t be approached lightly. And although there are a lot of needy kids out there, in this age of birth control it’s less true than it ever has been in history that the best way for those kids to have those needs filled is for them to be parted from one family and sent to another.